The XX Factor: What women really think.

Bring Back Noah's Ark

 Writing in the NYT Magazine last weekend, Rebecca Skloot made a great case for a Noah's ark approach to using animals to help people with disabilities. She profiled a blind woman who has a seeing-eye miniature horse—which sees more than a dog, is calmer, and lives much longer. A bipolar man who'd been episodically violent took enormous comfort from a parrot he'd trained to talk him down in moments of crisis. He's no longer violent. An intensely anxious woman has a soothing monkey that she never drives without. Yes, some of these species are wild, and all are a lot less familiar than the usual lab or golden retriever. But the public health risks seemed minimal. And the gains, for the people whose lives are opened up by these animals, huge.

Now Skloot reports on her blog that the Department of Justice is about to ban all species other than dogs from officially working as service animals. She has seen a leaked version of proposed new regulations that say that with regard to service animals, "animal means dog." This would strip disabled people who work with other species of their legal right to take them on a bus or into a restaurant, for example. It seems like exactly the wrong kind of stifling government interference. The new regulations aren't final yet. Skloot hopes they may be delayed until after Obama's inauguration so that his DoJ can toss them. At the moment, however, it looks dim for the horses and parrots—and worse for the people who rely on them.