[hombre_fatal]

Maybe it's only one part of an overall trend in cultural rot around rule enforcement.

A woman had her dog in the cart at Costco that kept barking at people.

I joked with an employee during check-out "So anyone can bring their dog to the store these days?" and she said they stopped confronting these people because it's not worth it and makes things worse. Worse for who?

Man, I thought that was the exact type of person worth confronting in civilized society. If we can't police minor antisocial behavior, what can we confront? We wait until it's so bad that we have no choice?

[bradleyjg]

The woman is going to claim it’s a service animal. There’s no real rules about service animals—-and even where there are rules, like with learning disabilities, doctors and other professionals act like whores and sell their signatures to anyone with money. It’s widespread bad parenting for generations now. How can a store fight that?

[csa]

> The woman is going to claim it’s a service animal. There’s no real rules about service animals

I agree with your overall point, but there are actually rules about what types of behavior are unacceptable for service animals. Uncontrolled or disruptive barking is one of those unacceptable behaviors.

The store would be entirely within their right to warn this person and remove the owner and/or ban the “service animal”.

That said, unless you have a legal team that aggressively embraces these sorts of acts against people who abuse the service animal rules, it’s almost always more practical just to let it go. Some of these folks have significant psychological issues, and you’ve already lost once you’ve entered a conflict with an unstable person.

[lazide]

Only if the rest of society won’t back you up. Which is the real issue. Society in general has turned into a bunch of lazy cowards.

[hombre_fatal]

If anything, the rest of society acts like you're the one out of line for confronting people who entitle themselves to bring their pet with them.

[II2II]

If you wait until it's so bad you have no choice, you usually lack the ability to enforce the rules.

When I'm in the position that I have to enforce rules, I usually provide an alternative and explain to people that they're not the problem. I spell out that problems arise when you have a dozen people breaking said rule, or when the people who come after them decide to push the limits even further. As long as they see the rules enforced consistently and equally, I rarely encounter any pushback. But until my employer got all of the staff to consistently enforce the rules, things were getting pretty nasty (threats towards staff, people doing stuff that would endager lives, etc.).