Delta Airlines Lets Person Bring "Emotional Support" Turkey On Flight---Are You Fucking Shitting Me?
(Yahoo)—In what sounds like the set up for a bad joke, a turkey and a man walked onto a plane.
Surprisingly, this not a joke.
On Sunday, passengers on a Delta Airlines flight were shocked when a turkey boarded their plane.
Capturing this shocking moment was Reddit user biggestlittlepickle who posted a photo with the caption, “My neighbour is a flight attendant. He just posted this photo of someone’s ‘therapy pet,’ on his flight.”
Yeah, I get that everybody has wildly different emotional needs and settings. It’s 2016 and the Epoch of Feelings has been part of life in America for awhile now. And I’m all for making uncomfortable people feel comfortable. But when it starts to affect several other people just so that that first person is no longer affected…why do we do that? [And please don’t apply any real world analogies here—I’m talking about animals on planes.]
I fucking love animals, all kinds. Personally, I have zero issue when somebody boards a plane with an “emotional support animal”, which is typically a dog or sometimes a cat. That’s because I don’t have cat or dog allergies, like dozens(?) of other people on the plane. Nor do I have a valid, childhood-based fear about dogs or cats that makes me freeze in fear in the presence of one, like some passengers have. But now the person with the animal is calm and is putting out a shitload of other people who already overspent to not inhale sinus-crushing pet dander, let alone fucking pig shit. So now a bunch of folks are quite possibly/likely inconvenienced to make one person comfortable.
Still, even a savage like me knows that a dog or a cat can provide genuine comfort to somebody that needs it and, for the most part, there are no issues with house pets. And most non-allergic, unscarred-by-pets fliers realize that. But…
A turkey for emotional support? Really? They’re dumb birds we eat en masse during the holidays, not an avian Sean Maguire. Where does this fucking end? Seagull? Monitor lizard? Emu? Galápagos tortoise (last thing the aisle needs)? The airlines (and others) need to nip this shit in the bud, STAT.
The process to get your animal ‘certified’ is vague and easy to manipulate, not unlike getting a weed card in California (not to mention, ESAs are not the same as ADA-protected service animals). And people are always gonna game the system. This is obviously a thing that is not going away. So if people are gonna start walking down the gangway like Dr. Doolittle, the dipshits in charge need to get together with Marlin Perkins and figure it the fuck out: tell people “you can fly with these (two) animals, you can gobble a fistful of Xanax, or you can get your Bobby Bacala on riding rusty-ass Amtrak”. Either that or the airlines need to start carrying antivenom for the inevitable “emotional support pit viper” bite.
letitbleedrearad@gmail.com