Under the Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA) a person with an emotional support dog is permitted to have that dog accompany him or her on airplanes. Moreover, the airlines are legally required to make certain reasonable accommodations for them. These accommodations include, but are not limited to, exempting you from any pet fees and allowing your dog to join you in the passenger cabin rather than be checked into the cargo compartment. Update : recently DOT ruled that airlines may treat ESA’s as pets and charge fees. Only Service dogs are allowed now. Learn how your ESA dog can become a service dog

Under the Fair Housing Act (FHA), people with an emotional support dog are allowed to take residence in housing with that dog even if that housing normally prohibits dogs from entering or taking residence. Property managers are also required to make certain reasonable accommodations for emotional support dogs. You cannot be charged a pet deposit for your emotional support dog, even if the residence normally charges pet-owners a deposit. Emotional support dogs may not be refused this right for reasons of their breed or size, even in facilities that explicitly limit dogs permitted to reside there to only certain sizes or breeds.

To complain about mistreatment in a housing situation relating to your emotional support dog, you can contact the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Because of the distinctions in rights between emotional support dogs and service dogs, the people you deal with while out in the world with your animal have certain rights as well, both those who have accountability for the space you have entered and the other people you encounter while in that space.

Dogs are known to be unconditionally loving, if not to everyone they meet then at least to the person who takes care of them. Dogs are unwaveringly loyal and unceasingly affectionate. They also can be trained with relative easy to obey basic commands like “sit,” “lie down” and “come” and to walk on a leash. They can likewise be socialized to behave in groups and public settings, including in the presence of other animals. They can also be housebroken, so as to avoid messes indoors. Dogs are eminently malleable in nature and have both boundless energy and ability to relax, so they can accompany a person on an activity when they need to be active and can quietly, patiently rest when they need to be calm.

While both service dogs and emotional support dogs are considered types of assistance dogs, there are distinct and significant differences between them. The key distinction between them is that service dogs are authorized for people with physical disabilities and emotional support dogs are authorized for people with mental and emotional disabilities. If a person has both physical and mental or emotional disabilities, then that person should get a service dog rather than an emotional support dog, and here’s why:

Service dogs are trained to perform or help perform certain tasks a person with a physical disability is unable to perform on his or her own. Emotional support dogs are not.

An emotional support dog cannot guide a blind person across a busy street, alert a deaf person to important sounds, retrieve items for a person in a wheelchair, help a person with balance issues to keep his or her balance, alert others when a person with epilepsy is having a seizure or any other duty that requires a specific action. The duty and action an emotional support dog performs it performs by the simple virtue of its presence. The emotional support dog provides comfort, calmness, uplifted spirits and a motivation to get out of bed to care for something when one doesn’t feel like caring for oneself, among other passive or non-skilled behaviors.

There is one other type of assistance dog that is similar in ways to both service and emotional support dogs but also distinctly different on its own: psychiatric service dogs. These are dogs authorized for people who suffer a debilitating psychiatric medical condition. They are trained to notice when a person is starting to have a psychiatric episode and aid in alleviating its symptoms. This they accomplish with more than their mere presence, but through actual, distinct and explicit actions. Psychiatric dogs are therefore afforded more similar rights to service dogs rather than those given to emotional support dogs.

While all dogs share certain characteristics of affection, loyalty, sociability and trainability, all breeds of dogs are different in certain ways that are equally distinct, including possessing those characteristics of of affection, loyalty, sociability and trainability in different measure (though it’s hard to find any dog not loyal to the person who feeds it.) And while not all dogs of a particular breed are exactly alike, there are certain tendencies innate to certain breeds: Chihuahua, Golden Retriever, Labrador Retriever, Yorkshire Terrier, Collie, German Shepherd, Corgi, Irish Wolfhound, American Pit Bull Terrier.