'Service dogs at risk': Bay Area's guide dog school deals with rise of fake service animals

Young Labrador puppy dogs play together during socialization training at the Guide Dogs for the Blind national headquarters in San Rafael, Calif. The puppies are in the first steps of their training to possibly become guide dogs for the blind. less Young Labrador puppy dogs play together during socialization training at the Guide Dogs for the Blind national headquarters in San Rafael, Calif. The puppies are in the first steps of their training to possibly ... more Photo: Douglas Zimmerman/SFGate Buy photo Photo: Douglas Zimmerman/SFGate Image 1 of / 33 Caption Close 'Service dogs at risk': Bay Area's guide dog school deals with rise of fake service animals 1 / 33 Back to Gallery

Theresa Stern has been legally blind since birth.

When she became an adult and started living on her own, she had a lot of anxiety about going to new places by herself, even with a white cane helping her along. That’s when Stern got her first guide dog.

“I never thought it was an option for me to have a guide dog. I thought you had to be totally blind, and I do have a little vision,” Stern said. “[Having a guide dog] has changed my life.”

But the support animal space is now getting crowded, with more animals being registered as “emotional support animals” and causing issues for people like Stern who rely on their dogs heavily on a daily basis.

One of Stern’s colleagues, who is also visually impaired and has a guide dog, was on a plane recently. Their dog was attacked before it even left the ground. The attacking dog was not removed from the plane, she said.

When guide dogs are attacked, they’re often traumatized — meaning they can no longer help their owner properly. It's likely they never recover fully from the experience, which means they can't work again.

“It just takes one attack and a guide dog will lose its confidence to do its job,” Christine Benninger, CEO of Guide Dogs for the Blind, said. “And now you’ve taken the owner’s eyes away. Not to mention their confidence and their best friend.”

It can take up to a year before the owner can get another dog.

With the rise in emotional support animals over the past few decade, Benninger is fielding more questions and concerns than ever about how to deal with them in public spaces. According to a New York Times article from last year, in 2011 the National Service Animal Registry, a for-profit company that sells official-looking vests and certificates for owners, had 2,400 service and emotional support animals in its registry. The number now is nearly 200,000.

As VP of Outreach at Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, the second-largest guide dog school in the world, Stern and her colleagues are facing even more problems in today’s modern Bay Area.

Stern said the situation with emotional support animals and fake service animals has gotten out of control, but she fears changes in legislation because it could affect her rights, too — which for her, means her independence. “It’s a threat to my ability to live the independent life that I want to live and the more people that take advantage of the system and animals are behaving badly in public the more likely it is that my rights will be infringed on,” she said. “I think there is also some legitimate confusion because of the way the air carrier access law is written now and people don’t realize the differences.”

Businesses are also looking to Guide Dogs for the Blind for guidance, as many don’t know what their rights are around the issue. Benninger explained that legally, as a business owner, you can ask if the animal is a service animal. Then, you can ask what type of service the dog is providing. Most importantly, she said, you can legally hold the animal accountable for their behavior. Even if it is a service animal, if it’s misbehaving in any way, a business owner can ask the animal and their owner to leave the business.

Benninger said businesses are often afraid of confrontation, or worse, getting sued.

Especially in an incredibly dog-friendly city like San Francisco, the lines are often blurred. But the city poses other concerns for people with guide dogs, notably new technology they may not have been trained to understand. The proliferation of e-scooters has presented a new challenge. If you think you get annoyed when there’s a scooter strewn across the sidewalk blocking access, imagine if you were blind.

The company recently bought scooters themselves so they could do proper simulations when training their dogs.

With more electric cars on the road, the organization had to teach dogs it’s good to disobey a command to say, cross the street, when they see a car coming but their owner can’t hear (or see) it.

Despite new challenges, the school is adapting and growing, having just built a new Puppy Center, where the dogs bred at the facility in San Rafael begin their journey to becoming a guide dog. The school was also the focus of a 2018 documentary called "Pick of the Litter," which was then developed into a television docu-series by the same name, now available on Disney+. The series follows families around the Bay Area known as “puppy raisers” who take care of the new dogs born at the school from around eight weeks of age until around 18 months.

Benninger said she hopes that through the series people can learn more about guide dogs and everything that goes into their training. They also might rethink whether to bring their pet into a social situation it’s not ready for.

“I understand that people love their pets. I love my pets,” Benninger said. “But when you take your pet into a social situation that it hasn’t been trained for you’re putting other service dogs at risk and the other thing is it’s not fun for your dog.”

Tessa McLean is a digital editor with SFGATE. Email her at tessa.mclean@sfgate.com or follow her on Twitter @mcleantessa.