Pets and service dogs in public places have always been controversial at best and problematic at worst, with one person’s “service dog” in California being more than a simple nuisance. Reddit user Throw_Away_Mango422, who works as security at a hospital, says that they’ve been put on unpaid leave. The reason is that a service dog they let in with its owner allegedly bit a nurse. The catch here is that this happened nine hours after Mango went home.
Mango states that they asked whether the patient’s dog was a service dog, and he responded, “yes.” However, “I also did not personally observe the dog behaving aggressively, and no incident involving the dog was reported to me during my shift,” OP added. Under the ADA, the guard asked the patient only one of the two permitted questions; the second was what the dog’s trained purpose is.
But now, over a third of the day later, surveillance caught this dog going in and out of the unit without any supervision, Mango explains. Eventually, it bit a nurse, and according to OP’s manager, they “failed to take appropriate action,” leaving them responsible. It should be noted that there are multiple people on the security team, but Mango seemingly took the punishment for what happened.
Reddit Believes the Security Guard Is Getting Wrongfully Blamed for This Service Dog Incident
Redditors are also rather confused about why Mango was allegedly the only one with unpaid leave. “Seems to me that someone is shifting blame and is also ‘friends’ with someone higher up than OP,” remarked a commenter. “Obviously it wasn’t you, you were off shift,” said another. “They’re just trying to pin the incident on you at this point,” agreed a third.
Many Reddit users are confident that this security guard shouldn’t be held responsible because Mango claimed they weren’t aware that this so-called “service dog” was actually banned from the hospital. However, no one told Mango about the restriction, leaving them with no other option than to trust the patient’s word.
In the end, there’s a lot of context missing from the story, with the hospital’s and other staff members’ side of things being a major one. Still, service dogs and irresponsible owners like in this story continue to give the specially trained animals a bad rap.
