This is the sort of clip that wouldn’t seem like a likely candidate to go viral, right? After all, those who own service dogs are not obligated to let everyone pet them. They are not there for others to pet, they are there to assist their owners with key tasks that they cannot complete on their own. When Megan was in a Pittsburgh mall training her service dogs, she was in the process of teaching them important new commands.
A woman approached a fellow handler with her daughter and asked if the service dogs could be petted. She was told no and that should have been that. Instead, the woman flew into a rage and came back to yell at the handler some more. She told them that she should have utilized some form of signage to let people know that the dogs are not to be petted. Little did she know how wrong she was.
Had this crazy experience yesterday at the mall where some lady asked if she could pet the dogs. People ask us all the time so I just said, “no.” All the dogs are working so it’s my go to answer. And they walked away. No big deal right? This lady went out of her way to come back with her child and yell at us for saying “no” and for not saying, “nO iM sOrRy ThEy’Re TrAiNiNg.” And we should “have a sign or something.” You mean the 20 patches on my dog that say don’t pet? ???? Entitlement these days is real. They even got mall security because we said they couldn’t pet the working dogs. ???????? Security said that the lady was crying ???? So much harassment for just saying no. This video is public and is shareable. There was no common sense here.
Posted by ML Leigh on Thursday, December 20, 2018
While Megan or her fellow handler may not have been carrying massive neon lights at the time, each of the dogs comes with a non-petting warning. Their vests clearly indicate that they are not to be petted by strangers. In our humble opinion, it sounds like this woman simply wanted something to complain about. All she is doing is teaching her daughter to throw tantrums when she does not get her way.
These are working dogs and it is time that people learned to show them the proper respect. This level of entitlement is disgusting and if this woman wanted to pet the dogs so badly, she should have taken the time to look at their patches. Can you believe that the woman even went to get mall security to “assist” her during this ridiculous tirade?
Not only did she disturb the innocent service dogs but she even attempted to rile up the mall security staff. We cannot believe how ridiculous she was being and we hope that she learned some sort of lesson from all this. We also hope that her daughter realizes just how wrong she was. Please share this video to spread awareness.
With any luck, future incidents like this one can be avoided. There is no reason for a grown woman to behave so shabbily. Why people think they are entitled to everything that they want like this is beyond us. These dogs deserve better than to have their training interrupted by an angry woman who refuses to listen to logic or reason.
