Pit Bull Discrimination

The Professor brought me the October 9th edition of The Blue Devil’s Advocate, which is the student paper of the Kansas City Kansas Community College.

Their lead story is about Maddie the pit bull, who is a trained service dog whose job it is to sense when Candi Butcher is going to have an epileptic seizure and warn her so that she can prepare for them.  Candi says, “I had a seizure on the side of the street and she kept me from wandering into traffic and getting killed.”

Since moving to Kansas four months ago, Butcher has been denied entrance into her doctor’s office and cannot ride the bus because her doctor and the bus driver don’t give a shit that Maddie is Candi’s service animal, but instead are concerned that she’s a scary pit bull.  She also was denied a job at Walmart because of the dog.

The thing is, though, that this seems to violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The paper reports that ADA regulation stipulate, “You may exclude any animal, including a service animal, from your facility when that animal’s behavior poses a direct threat to the health or safety of others.  For example, any service animal that displays vicious behavior towards other guests or customers may be excluded.  You may not make assumptions, however, about how a particular animal is likely to behave based on your past experience with other animals.  Each situation must be considered individually.”  [emphasis mine]

Butcher is making flyers and writing letters, trying to educate people about her dog.  If that fails, she’ll look into getting legal counsel. 

I would suggest that Ms. Butcher look into getting legal counsel immediately, since, as faithful readers will recall, Kansas City, Kansas recently banned all pit bulls from the city and is rounding them up to kill them.  Maddie is lucky that the worst thing that’s happened to her is that she can’t get on the bus. 

If Anyone Should Have a Pod Cast…

It’s the Butcher.

For some reason, he had nothing going on last night and so we sat around watching TV and eating Chinese and cracking each other up.

He was also doing laundry.  He’s broken the dryer.  I’m waiting to see how long it takes him to mention that.  So far it’s been a week with no word.

Not that it’s broken to an unusable point, but you do have to set the time you want it to go with a pair of pliers, which means you have no idea how long y0u’ve set it for, just that it’s set.

He went to a wedding this weekend and was showing me all the pictures he took of his suits.  Apparently, he hung them all up, snapped photos of them all, and then took the camera to the store and picked out a cool tie that would go with one of them.

He did get a pretty cool tie, too, so maybe that’s a good strategy.

Ha, sorry.  This post sucks.  I’m distracted.  He didn’t get Sunday off, so I’m not sure how I’m getting to the airport.  I guess I need to see if the Professor’s in town.  And when I start to think that the work week that started a week ago yesterday won’t be over with until a week from Saturday, I start to feel a little frazzled.

I know a lot of people work twenty days straight without complaint, but I am not those people.  Here I am only on day nine and I already don’t know what day it is or whether I have clean underwear or when I’m going to do the dishes.

On the plus side, day nine is almost half way through!  So, all I have to do is hang in there for eleven more days and then I can have a day off, come into the office, get all my travel stuff straightened out, and take some real days off that just involve laying around on my couch all day. 

So, onward!

Plus, I think I’ve been kicking ass in the thoughtful post department, so as much as I like to whine, I kind of think having my schedule disrupted has been good for my brain.

Looking Good, But Not Feeling Good

The Shill’s sister is an accomplished jewelry maker. While we were up there, she was parading around a stunning necklace of lacy metallic joy. I loved it. I even tried to discern how much it might cost for a girl to get one for herself, but to no avail.

So, what should arrive today?

No, not Tiny the Wonder Fetus (who would, at that point, become Tiny the Wonder Baby). A necklace of my very own!

I put it on Mrs. Wigglebottom in an effort to raise her spirits. You can see it didn’t exactly move her to good health. But at least she’s not making that noise any more.

And on an even cooler note, according to the brief message in with the necklace, the style has been named after me. It’s called the Theckla.

Oops. I spoke too soon. She’s making it again.