Emotional Support Nation

Recently, a woman had to be asked to leave a passenger airliner because of her “emotional support pig” which weighed around 80 pounds. According to other passengers, before they finally told her to get off the plane, the pig had already started shrieking, running up and down the aisles, and defecating. Which, of course, it would do. It’s a pig. The airline said they didn’t understand how she got on the plane with the pig in the first place. Well, the answer is obvious: All she had to do was plead Most Special Victim Status and this was her “emotional support animal”. And people are afraid to contest these things because they don’t want to be labelled as intolerant or whatever. Or get sued.

Now, about 40 years ago or so, the thought would have never occurred to anyone to try and bring a pig on to a passenger plane. The concept of an “emotional support animal” might be something you found on the dime store paperback racks for .75 cents along with horoscope books and how-to books on levitation and clairvoyance. But there was no way society at large would accept ten teacup poodles in a shopping cart at the grocery store as “emotional support animals” without a padded ambulance being called. “Yes, ma’am, we’ll get you all the emotional support you need…now just lie down on the gurney…we’ll call your family…”

See, what has happened is society has lost the ability to act in what we call “appropriate social behavior”. That being: You don’t discuss sexual and/or personal hygiene issues over the phone where everyone in public can hear you, you don’t let your kids scream in restaurants, you don’t bring dogs into supermarkets, and you do not bring pigs on passenger airliners. Nor do you bring emotional support ducks, goats, pygmy ponies, marmots, badgers, prairie dogs, or large raptorial birds capable of removing facial features in one whack. Nor do you bring primates, though these days, it is hard to distinguish between the alarm calls of baboons and gibbons and the shrieking of human children. These things were not done in the past. But now, they are not only done, but you better not say anything to these people or they’ll have a full-fledged meltdown in public. More behavior that was once taboo in public but now common and accepted.

Americans used to poke fun at the public transportation in Third World nations because people brought chickens and goats on to planes, trains, and buses. The difference, though, is telling: Those animals were for eating at the intended destination. They were not “companions”. They were dinner. The “emotional support” was a fully belly. Here’s America now dragging all manner of animal life on to planes, buses, and trains and everyone acts like we’re not seeing the full-blown descent into mass Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen-By-Proxy by the entire nation. Soon, you won’t know if you’re on a passenger plane or an aerial version of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. They ought to dress all the flight crew as Marlon Perkins with safari jackets and bush hats.

These people say they love animals. Huh. Animals don’t love flying, people! That’s why the Wild Kingdom crew had to tranq dart those zebras before they loaded them on the bush plane to fly them to Zambezi or someplace! See, the animals that fly are pretty obvious: They have wings. But those animals we call birds prefer to do their own flying under their own power, see? Be that as it may, we can be certain that America will get even more bat-bleep crazy as we go along.

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