Service Animals Should Be Ugly

I saw someone with an adorable beagle the other day. The beagle looked at me all sad, begging to be petted. However, the beagle was wearing a little vest with “SERVICE ANIMAL: DO NOT PET” emblazoned thereupon. I did not pet the beagle.

However, this brought up what I thought was a good point. Service animals should be ugly. Or menacing. Or something that doesn’t make us want to pet them.

After all, you can’t pet service animals. You just can’t do it. Service animals have an important job and they have to concentrate on it. Teaching them to interact with anyone other than the person they are working with, such as for the purposes of affection, disrupts that job. It can even ruin a service animal if they learn to seek affection rather than paying attention to their job.

Still, it was really hard not to pet that beagle. It was just so cute, looking at me all sad and all.

It’s got to be hard to have a cute service animal. No matter what vest you put on, no matter how much you warn people, people are going to keep trying to pet your service animal. They’re just going to keep doing it.

It’d be so much better to have one that people don’t want to pet.