#disability equity

1. The Era of “Innocent” Disability

The formal history of service dogs in the West began as a response to World War I. Thousands of veterans returned home from the frontlines with injuries and visible disabilities—specifically blindness from mustard gas and metal shrapnel. Because WW1 had included a huge draft of the civilian population, the perspective of blindness shifted from the consequential poor tragedy of signing up to become a soldier to heightened public concern as men returning from war were expected to continue as the predominant economic labor workforce. To counteract the loss of autonomy and financial consequences of being blind, war veterans have a disabled man, Arthur Pearson, to thank for pushing for tools and services that would allow veterans to return to civilian society. Pearson suffered from progressive glaucoma in which surgery at the time could not fix, and so in 1913 at the age of 47, he completely lost his sense of vision. Using his professional connections, Pearson was able to establish St. Dunstan’s, an organization dedicated to blind veterans with the goal of teaching them “how to be blind.” Pearson took his job seriously, going beyond the model of teaching self-care for veterans to then eventually be left to their own devices and towards building services that actively aided veterans in finding employment and purpose in their lives. Pearson dedicated his organization to the welfare of blind men, promising that his organization would care for the welfare of the blind for 40 or 50 years until they died. With World War II again increasing the amount of blinded men after the war, activists like Arthur Pearson and others arose to provide support and security for men to continue their lives, thus allowing blindness as a disability to became more visible and accepted.

Unlike its Western European counterparts, the United States did not experience the same boon in blindness advocacy, largely in part due to the U.S.’s late entry into the war. From WWI, only 726 veterans were receiving benefits related to war-blindness, so it wasn’t until the U.S. declared war on Germany in 1917 that measures were taken to address the growing number of blind veterans. A committee was formed that included the heads of schooling for blind children, leaders in adult blindness dedicated to ensuring employment for the blind, the head in charge of the Library of Congress’s Reading Room for the Blind, the editor of a popular magazine for the blind, and one layman assigned as the treasurer of the Commission on Uniform Type for the Blind. This advisory committee then drafted a plan for the U.S. government regarding the rehabilitation of blind soldiers which included the training needed for self care as well as games for recreation. At these rehabilitation centers, one competent blind man was required to serve as inspiration for veterans and the committee included a thorough curriculum that included employment, recreation, and a list of literature to be integrated with braille for the blind to read. Much of this plan was modeled after St. Dunstan’s and other organizations in Europe that succeeded due to privatized funds; however, the U.S. was determined to carry out the project as a governmental affair. In 1918, the U.S. accepted its first veteran to the property of Evergreen (renamed the U.S. Army General Hospital No. 7) where veterans were taken care of until they could be discharged back into military service. This was another difference setting the U.S. apart from the Western European movement: while St. Dunstan’s was a voluntary program that allowed officers to be discharged from the British army and receive disability compensation, the U.S. would keep men employed for military duty until a medical board determined they were fit to return for service. Most of the U.S. veterans who had hoped for an experience like St. Duncan’s were disappointed to find civilian teachers who weren’t respectful or motivated and treatment plans that were rarely personalized to address the specific individual needs of each person’s disability. Eventually seeing the wide gap in the federal government’s inability to properly meet this standard, the Red Cross took measures to promote blind veterans towards fulfilling lives with various employment and recreational opportunities, fully supporting the idea that blindness cannot stop a person’s desire to enjoy life in the same manner as their able-bodied peers.

Introduced during WWI, service dogs worked on the frontlines with soldiers in the trenches carrying out various tasks such as carrying weapons, supplies, important messages, and identifying wounded soldiers who needed medical treatment. First aid dogs were specifically bred and trained for months before heading out into the battlefield. These dogs were trained to either find and stay with a wounded solider or bring back evidence to medical teams indicating the need for medical help, and often these dogs would carry first aid packs with them to be used by the wounded soldiers, granting them tools to stabilize their condition until help arrived. Guide dogs were not a new phenomenon coming out of WWI and actually already had a reputation as dogs that would help blind civilians navigate the world. Germany had particular success with German Shepards who would accompany their handlers to work and help guide them through the city, often restoring their handler’s confidence and independence. Service dogs then became a status symbol reflecting the noble sacrifice veterans had endured to protect their country, so service dog training retained its military background by using strict and rigid standards to teach dogs how to navigate for the blind. With the success of guide dogs for blind veterans, eventually guide dogs became available for blind civilians, increasing the visibility of disability worldwide. However, the U.S. remained skeptical about guide dogs and thus focused more on navigating for the blind using a long white cane as it was considered more “self-reliant” than a dog.

These perspectives then guided disability advocacy with Western European countries fully integrating service dogs into disabled peoples’ lives to return them to a functioning civilian life while the U.S. popularized its medical model of disability. Disabled people were often given the simplest tool to manage their impairment so that they can move on from a broken solider into the functional solider who had to re-conform to society’s standards.

2. The ADA and Clinical Expansion of Disability

Perhaps due to the culture of disability performance and a model that focuses on returning the disabled person back to a functioning member of society, the 1970s began the wave of disability civil rights and further promotion of disability awareness and acceptance. In 1973, the U.S. federal government introduced section 504 to The Rehabilitation Act that explicitly wrote protections for the right of disabled individuals to be employed without prejudice or discrimination; however, for four years, the federal government refused to sign the regulations that would actually enforce this part of the law. So in 1977, disabled activists led by prominent leaders such as Judy Heumann staged sit-in protests at various federal buildings across the U.S., and some of these protests, like the San Francisco sit-in, lasted for days. The San Francisco sit-in set the record for the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in U.S. history with 28 days. This movement established two critical things for the future of U.S. disability civil rights: if the U.S. was going to demand labor from disabled bodies, they could not view those people as “lesser than” either in character or productivity from their able-bodied counterparts and that disabled people were no longer accepting of the “patient” view of disability where health professionals assumed disabled people were weak and timid, thus requiring them to accept medical “expert” advice that was not informed from the disabled perspective. Instead of passive compliance, disabled individuals established themselves as a political class wherein disability could be considered as the social construction of barriers to care rather than an innate biological defect. Leading up to the ADA, public perception of disability was moving away from the eugenics era where people wanted to eliminate the possibility of disability from future generations towards a social minority group model. This allowed for an expansion of disability from certain diagnoses to a unified community that could fight for the civil rights of all disabled people as a means to move beyond the “tragedy” narrative of disability and towards inaccessibility as a metric of prejudice and discrimination. It absolved people of the public’s opinion that disability was a “punishment” or a “life sentence” that a disabled person had to manage by themselves and allowed activists to push for further work by the federal government to acknowledge the systemic barriers that made disability so difficult to manage.

When the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was introduced and then stalled within Congress by business lobbyists, the disabled community again unified to force the federal government to recognize their numbers and their struggle. On March 12, 1990, 60 activists chose to abandon their mobility aids and crawled up 78 stone steps of the U.S. Capitol, firmly showing the public the harsh reality of living with disability. This movement was a deliberate response to the country’s “inspiration porn” narrative that focused on people “overcoming” their disability in “miracles” that returned their ability to function “normally”. The term inspiration porn was coined by activist Stella Young who defined the term as the objectification of disabled people as “models of inspiration” for able-bodied people, trapping disability within a restricted model where functioning was seen as a quality everyone should be capable of, despite the fact that disabled people often had to push themselves harder than able-bodied people because they lacked the support or accommodations to keep up with society’s expectations. U.S. society expected disabled people to be either a grateful patient who remained positive above all else, have a visible disability wherein progressive improvement could be outwardly observed by other people, or to center their journey on “overcoming” their disability. This is where ideas about gatekeeping come from, where the people who were willing to conform to society’s desires would then question and harass other disabled handlers’ use of a service dog. They wanted to retain the social status granted to them as the “acceptable” disabled person for an ableist society.

When Congress did finally pass the ADA, the bill redefined the role of service dogs for the disabled. Service dogs were expanded beyond guide dogs that served as navigation help for the blind to include physical, sensory, psychiatric, and intellectual disabilities. This was due in part to new scientific research on dog physiology that acknowledged a dog’s keen scent sensitivity could be used as a biometric monitor to track changes in human health, thus opening the role of service dogs to physical mobility support and medical alert functions. The ADA further acknowledged the invisible aspects of disability by allowing service dogs to perform health-monitoring tasks that didn’t require visible observation by an outside party. This supported the community’s ideals to move away from inspiration porn as a way to make able-bodied people more comfortable about the existence of disability and towards increased autonomy for the disabled handler. The intentional exclusion of requirements like professional certification and vests to physically identify service dogs were meant to minimize the barriers that would prevent the inaccessibility of service dogs to the poor and most disabled people by prioritizing the functional relationship over an institutional standard of approval.

So although disabled activists fought for legal protections for the civil rights of disabled people, society’s rigid acceptance of disability forced people into the medical model of disability where the human body is seen as a “problem” to be fixed utilizing all available medications and treatment plans before “deserving” a service dog. Unfortunately, this idea is still preserved among service dog handler communities as the practical reality of a fully trained service dog relied on organizational programs that sold dogs at high prices to reflect the amount of labor and expenses required for a full-time service dog. Because of this barrier, service dogs are mostly acquired by the economically privileged who can conform to an ableist society’s qualifications for “acceptable” disabilities. This has resulted in service dog handlers who are out of touch with the largely disenfranchised community of disabled individuals and who have thus reverted back to ableist ideas that would make the activists of the 90’s turn in their graves.