Airport-born puppies in Florida

May 29, 2018 1:31 PM

A US service dog unexpectedly gave birth to eight puppies in the middle of the Tampa International Airport
posted by readinghippo (30 comments total)

Well that’s just flipping adorable!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 1:38 PM on May 29, 2018

12/10.

12/10, 12/10, 12/10, 12/10, 12/10, 12/10, 12/10, and 12/10.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:43 PM on May 29, 2018 [36 favorites]

Best internet ever! Also love the other dog (daddy?) in the top photo looking on worriedly. Someone get that doggie a cigar.
posted by RandomInconsistencies at 1:48 PM on May 29, 2018 [8 favorites]

Don't miss the links in the You May Also Be Interested In section.

Came for the puppies, stayed for the dog that adopted 9 orphaned ducklings. With adorable pics!
posted by arha at 1:51 PM on May 29, 2018 [10 favorites]

Puppies are always cute and mommadogs are good dogs but WTF were they thinking of when trying to fly with a hugely pregnant dog? It's not like an endgame-pregnant bitch is something subtle; they look like they've swalled a zeppelin.

So yay doggies! And boo irresponsible owners. But also YAY DOGGIES!
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 2:04 PM on May 29, 2018 [45 favorites]

scream
posted by poffin boffin at 2:11 PM on May 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

Cute and adorable, but I would have thought service dogs were automatically spayed or neutered. Beyond the fact that there are no shortages of potential service dogs, being without your service dog until the puppies are weaned might be a very serious inconvenience for the owner. What if you can't work without the help of the dog? I doubt FMLA covers a service dog busy with her puppies.
posted by COD at 2:11 PM on May 29, 2018 [25 favorites]

Unexpected item in the baggage area.
posted by arcticseal at 2:13 PM on May 29, 2018 [54 favorites]

If the US mandated paid maternity leave than Eleanor wouldn't have been forced to work so close to her due date.
posted by ckape at 2:14 PM on May 29, 2018 [77 favorites]

Puppies are always cute and mommadogs are good dogs but WTF were they thinking of when trying to fly with a hugely pregnant dog? It's not like an endgame-pregnant bitch is something subtle; they look like they've swalled a zeppelin.

The article is pretty light on details, but it sounds like maybe the owners were operating under this very assumption and were then surprised when it turned out to be false.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:15 PM on May 29, 2018 [9 favorites]

Yeah, I severely doubt those are actual service dogs, as in trained to perform a specific task. At best emotional support dogs, more likely "we brought a certificate on the internet" because even trained ESA dogs are usually spayed. And it was tremendously irresponsible of the owners to plan to fly with a pregnant dog and not confirm with a vet whether they were safely far away from their due date.

Glad the puppies are okay.
posted by tavella at 2:17 PM on May 29, 2018 [39 favorites]

In other news, this watering can also gave birth to adorableness.
posted by biffa at 2:52 PM on May 29, 2018 [12 favorites]

it sounds like maybe the owners were operating under this very assumption and were then surprised when it turned out to be false

Nah; you can see in one of the pictures that she's big as a house. Anyway, if they'd ever bothered to take their pregnant dog to the vet, they should have received a pretty-accurate due date.

Again though: YAY DOGGIES!
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:08 PM on May 29, 2018 [10 favorites]

This is not a cute situation. This is a bad situation blundered into by bad people who shouldn’t be trusted to care for animals.
posted by bleep at 3:34 PM on May 29, 2018 [48 favorites]

This goat is officially dead, ya'll!

I agree that these people, are, uh, problematic. But the dogs are good dogs.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 3:40 PM on May 29, 2018 [16 favorites]

Thank you, thank you, thank you God and chance, for this pregnant dog not being on any flight I was on. So, great, one more thing to make flying not delightful.
posted by Gnella at 3:40 PM on May 29, 2018

These are very sweet-looking, very cute dogs and a very cute story that strongly implies that someone did not know what they were doing at all.

I'm also vaguely side-eyeing the concept that two service dogs who just happen to be the matched co-working partners of a mother and daughter were the best possible breeding match. That... does not really match my experience of larger-scale service dog programs, where the breeding animals are usually not service dogs themselves so as not to inconvenience their handlers by, say.... giving birth when you're trying to fly somewhere for work or something.

Other articles say that the owners knew the dog was pregnant but didn't realize she was so far along. It's not like she's a fat pony, guys--there's a sixty-day gestation period. Don't you remember when she was last in heat? How the hell do you miss a bitch in heat, especially with an intact male in the house? They're not any more subtle!

They could be owner/trainer/handler dogs, but there's a People article here saying that the bitch is still in training and.... I'm sorry, why would you breed a dog in training? (She is apparently task-trained or in the process of being task-trained as a mobility dog, at least.)

There are many people who train their own service dogs--my partner is seriously contemplating the process of training a hearing-alert and mobility dog in the next few years on the basis that they're likely to eventually need one--and some people do incorporate their service dogs into ethical breeding programs. The Venn Diagrams of "interested enough in service dogs to train my own" and "interested enough in dogs/feels strongly enough about dogs to run an ethical breeding program" have a fairly high overlap among dog people with disabilities! And this is of course especially true of, say, people who are broke and acquire service prospects as half-grown conformation washouts, which a few people I have known do, and whose dogs are trained well enough to do their jobs intact. Sometimes breeders will donate an animal with a promising temperament and lovely structure who doesn't enjoy the conformation ring and request the ability to breed back at a future point. There are definitely possibilities that could lead to this being a reasonably ethical situation.

But it's definitely weird, if adorable. I'm glad everyone was all right and that they didn't have an issue with a stressed mama trying to give birth on an actual plane.
posted by sciatrix at 3:43 PM on May 29, 2018 [31 favorites]

But it's definitely weird, if adorable.

This reminds me of "tardar sauce" the cat, ie Grumpy Cat. A fiction we're all supposed to pretend to believe because we want to enjoy the cute animals! And this dog and her puppies are super cute, but they're no more service dogs than I am!

People: Spay and neuter your pets! Don't call your pet a service animal!
posted by Justinian at 3:46 PM on May 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

They're good dogs, Bront. The people.... eh, maybe not so much.
posted by tclark at 3:57 PM on May 29, 2018 [8 favorites]

You can buy that service dog vest for $25 on Amazon.

Spaying and neutering of pets should be a procedure that's inexpensive, easily obtainable, and mandatory unless the pet owner has a damn good reason otherwise. I just had a sick stray kitten die on me last night, and 3 more plus the mamacat that may die in the heat unless I can find them indoor homes, because all the local rescues are overflowing from kitten/puppy season. So this cute owner story of "haha we were completely surprised by and unprepared for our dog having seven puppies LOLZ!" is rubbing me the wrong way today.
posted by nicebookrack at 4:16 PM on May 29, 2018 [31 favorites]

Yeah, this just like shouldn't happen...what the hell, humans.


Good doggies.
posted by Grandysaur at 4:54 PM on May 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

Thank you good people of metafilter, I thought I was going to be the only one to find this creepy. The owners are creepy I mean, not the poor dogs. I hope those dogs are going to be OK, but this situation smells as rank 5 day old gym shorts. At the very least those irresponsible owners should be publicly shunned for putting the mother dog through such stress. This really made me mad!
posted by WalkerWestridge at 9:40 PM on May 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

The one without testicles is going to be a crappy service dog. Burned out by emotional labor at a very early age.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 2:09 AM on May 30, 2018

nthing the people are assholes angle here. Makes me wonder if they stole the bitch knowing she was pregnant & were going to sell the pups. Makes me terribly sad & there is definitely more to this story than has been reported.
posted by yoga at 5:39 AM on May 30, 2018

Hey, at least they didn't try to pass off a "service peacock."
posted by Naberius at 6:46 AM on May 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Oh, come the fuck on, guys. The dogs are highly unlikely to be stolen--for one thing, why would you steal the male too? The pups will probably be all right--they're traveling by cabin, and hopefully there won't be any exposure to anything like parvo because there are relatively few places for them to encounter other dogs. The bitch doesn't appear to be displaying visible stress cues in any of the photos I've seen, and presumably this would not be circulating as "super cute" if she'd been upset enough to growl or bite any observers. The simplest explanation is that these are people who are probably not paying enough attention to vet care

I mean, they're lucky in about eighty different ways and there are a metric shit-ton of ways this could have gone horribly wrong: the bitch could have needed medical intervention; she could have gone into labor on the actual flight and been stuck trying to give birth under a seat or in the aisle; the pups could have contracted diseases from the airport; the bitch could have been 10% less placid and panicked at the people milling around her newborn puppies and growled at or bitten someone; the bitch could have gone into labor while trying to move through the terminal; the pups could be dropped or stepped on; the stress of the labor and movement could have triggered the bitch to harm the pups or reject them. So far, from the evidence, it looks like they got incredibly lucky.

Southeastern Guide Dogs--that's the local guide dog school--has issued a public criticism. In many ways I am very uncomfortable with this, because like I said, I know a number of working teams with owner-trainer service dogs who are ethically handled, managed, and trained to do specific support tasks--and these tasks are not always obvious to the general public, so these teams get frequently harassed and accused of faking the dog's skillset.

This issue is compounded because service dog schools like SGD are generally slightly more in favor of measures like licensing, etc. in part because they can afford to be. It is vastly more expensive to acquire a professionally trained dog than it is to acquire a good prospect--assuming you have dog-world contacts, experience training, a good eye for temperament, and don't mind gambling just a touch--and train the dog yourself. (Most reputable schools don't require disabled folks to pay for the dogs, but this means that they also tend to have long waiting lists.)

This goes double for folks who have service needs that aren't easily trainable in the context of a school. Epilepsy is one common example--epileptic alerting is not something all dogs are skilled at noticing and alerting to, and epilepsy alert dogs often start life as pets that do learn to alert and can then be task-trained. Unfortunately, anyone who goes this route and handles any type of dog other than a Golden Retriever, Labrador Retriever, or perhaps a German Shepherd Dog or poodle tends to get a lot of suspicion and gatekeeping from the general public. (This is particularly unfortunate to me because I know for a fact that SGD occasionally uses Smooth or Rough Collies--they have a strong relationship with the University of Georgia, where I went to school, and I met quite a few young Collies in training wearing their trademark yellow capes.)

I don't really want to defend these specific idiots--whether or not the dogs are actually task trained, they are almost certainly not handling the breeding aspect competently. But the gleeful condemnation of them and joyous argument abut whether or not the dogs are real service dogs plays into a narrative that I often see used to make the lives of people who are real service dog handlers very difficult, and it's making me uncomfortable here. I have absolutely no disagreement with the concept that fakers who bring poorly trained pets into areas designated for service dogs are ultimately people being assholes, but I am also mindful of the fact that social censure for people who are "cheating" at using accommodations usually spills over immediately onto people who are, in fact, actually disabled.
posted by sciatrix at 7:38 AM on May 30, 2018 [13 favorites]

When a 'service dog' gives birth at Tampa airport, controversy takes flight
posted by lucien at 8:45 AM on June 2, 2018

"I was just trying to get them home safely. I didn’t want to be flying so close to when she was due, but I have personal family issues that prevented me from leaving Florida sooner. What was I supposed to do?"

Give them up because you don't know the first thing about caring for them?
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:20 PM on June 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Or leave them with their family in Florida. Or rent a van and drive, like they ended up doing. Still not great if she goes into labor but at least you can pull over to a safe place quickly.

Also, the hamster story mentioned in passing is just horrible. She murdered a pet animal cruelly and deliberately and it's the airline's fault? She should have been arrested for animal abuse, not given certificates.
posted by tavella at 1:57 PM on June 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Van Atter disagreed. She told the Tampa Bay Times that Nugget and Ellie did not come from a specialized breeding program, just a regular breeder. They weren’t trained by a service dog organization, but a private trainer who taught Nugget to help with a litany of health issues, including detecting dangerous drops in her blood pressure or blood sugar, she said. Ellie is undergoing the same training, she said.

She didn’t have the dogs fixed because she’s worried it could affect their hormones and lead to cancer, whichshe said happened to a previous dog. A 2014 study found a possible link between spaying and neutering and a higher risk for certain types of cancer, though experts say more research is needed and recommend fixing most dogs.

And yet, "These are absolutely service dogs. I stand by that," Van Atter said by phone Wednesday. "There’s no reason a service dog can’t be pregnant. That’s absolutely wrong."

Blurring the lines further is how Van Atter additionally describes Ellie and Nugget as both emotional support animals and her pets, something the IGDF, Assistance Dogs International and Southeastern Guide Dogs don’t do. But even while mostly disagreeing with Van Atter, a spokeswoman for Assistance Dogs International agrees there can be legitimate service dogs that are privately trained as Ellie and Nugget were.

So.... this is exactly the best-case scenario I mentioned upthread? Delaying or avoiding spay/neuter for cancer reasons is actually a very common practice in some dog breeds among responsible and well-informed dog owners, depending on their cancer predispositions; Golden Retrievers are one of them. (It's not uncommon for people who are paying attention to this to schedule dogs for hysterectomies/ovary-saving-spays or vasectomies to make oops litters like this impossible, but it is also not uncommon for people to simply leave dogs intact, especially because vets sometimes respond with confusion to the request.) The article is right that the results are mixed, but it doesn't add that the results are particularly mixed because the impact of spay/neuter on cancer risk depends heavily on the specific cancer genetic predispositions that you're trying to interact with and so it depends heavily on the breeds or lines of dogs you're working with.

I am really unhappy with all sides of the public discussion of this case. This woman sounds to me like someone who definitely has no business breeding dogs and had no intention of breeding dogs in the first place, but also someone who is a legitimate service dog handler--albeit someone who should have done many things differently here, including temporarily sidelining the bitch from active service work until the puppies are ready to leave and/or aborting the litter when the pregnancy became evident.

She does not sound like someone who is just taking her pets places. She does not sound like someone abusing the emotional support rules. She does sound like someone who is a little sloppy with her terminology and someone who has wound up with a situation that she didn't intend to find herself in, panicked, and wound up making further mistakes as a result. Those dogs need to be altered--whether or not we're talking neutering/spay or vasectomy/OSS, or even just returning the female to the breeder and seeing if there's an older male pup to pick up as her service dog in training. She needed to handle this much better than she did, but I can see the pattern of decisions that led to her overestimating her ability to handle canine reproduction responsibly, and I don't think those are skills that actually impinge on her ability to responsibly handle a service dog--just her ability to responsibly handle an intact dog. (And those are not nearly as difficult as many people think; we kept an intact bitch for several years when I was a kid while my parents toyed with the idea of seriously breeding and ultimately spayed her with zero oops incidents or close calls. It can be done, but it is extra work and it is more difficult with an intact male in the house.)

Guide dog schools are not the only legitimate way to train or obtain service dogs. I cannot emphasize this enough. There are ways in which the big training schools work that I have some serious skepticism about, particularly certain practices that I think probably contribute to the washout rate (certain things to do with switching puppy raisers and moving dogs from household to kennel to a new trainer that I think are fairly stressful on the dog; the rigidity of speed and communication demanded from the dog; the desire to produce a cookie-cutter product that can be matched to any number of people). There are other ways in which they do really good things, and they have a powerful level of public legitimacy as a result of their history and status. But there's a distinct tendency to assume that the only way you can legitimately train and handle a service dog is as a result of their own gatekeeping, and frankly that is just not true.

Here's what bothers me: disability accommodations are often made more difficult to access, even for "real" disabled people, by able-bodied/minded people focus on gatekeeping "cheaters" from using them. It bothers me to see someone coming from a relatively privileged perspective from a gatekeeping point of view going so hard against someone who does seem to actually be using the dogs as service dogs in a way she's entitled to. And the woman's irresponsibility doesn't have anything to do with the dogs being service dogs--if they were smaller dogs, say, and she was traveling with a heavily pregnant chihuahua bitch in a carrier, I would be just as angry with her and say she was just as irresponsible as I would have done here. Probably more so, actually, because most of the specific cancer risks that are strongly modified by spay/neuter are things that apply more strongly to large breeds.

This blowback isn't just going to hit this woman. It's going to wash over every service dog handler who works a dog who doesn't fit the guide dogs for the blind mold, every service dog runner who already experiences more challenges and gatekeeping than the training schools' graduates do irrespective of whether they need the dog, whether the dog is well trained enough to justify public access, or even whether they are doing anything even slightly wrong. And I think that omitting that in your criticism of this woman is a dangerous thing to do.
posted by sciatrix at 2:39 PM on June 2, 2018