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: the dark goddess of replevin speaks

Service Snakes

This has to be one of the funniest opinions I have ever read. God bless him, the trial judge played it perfectly straight.

The hapless plaintiffs had two problems:
(1) they wanted to use medical marijuana in federally-subsidized housing. True, Washington has a law created by initiative that provides an affirmative defense to prosecution under state law, but use of marijuana is still illegal under federal law;
(2) more entertaingly, they wanted to claim that their snakes were "service animals [sic]" under the ADA.

OK, what's wrong with this picture? Leaving aside the fact that a reptile is not, by definition, an "animal," the animal has to be individually trained to do work or perform similar tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability. The guy's physician actually did state that he suffered from depression and the snakes were his "therapy pets." Now, I imagine you could train a bird to ask, "How do you feel about that," but a snake? The case law is pretty clear that deriving comfort from an animal is not enough. It has to have special training. Here the plaintiff lost because he was unable to show that he trained the snakes to perform specific tasks or that they had any other unique qualities.

You get more of a sense of what this guy must have been like as a tenant from the dry comment in the facts that he "claimed an unlimited right to carry the snakes around with him, including when he paid his rent."

Full post as published by the dark goddess of replevin speaks on March 17, 2010 (boomark / email).