Debby Rose Case

From Service Dog Training

Links to the court opinion have been updated

A while back I wrote this blog post about Debby Rose and her so-called service monkey. At that point, Debby Rose had filed suit under the ADA, the Civil Rights Act, and the Missouri Human Rights Act against the Greene County Health Department for sending out letters saying that food service establishments should not let the monkey in and against Walmart and Cox Health for not letting her bring her monkey into their facilities as a result of these letters. The Civil Rights Act case and Missouri Human Rights Act case were both thrown out, but the ADA case was allowed to proceed.

The lawsuit was recently settled with a summary judgment against Debby Rose in the Western District Court of Missouri. The full opinion can be found here. (Opens in a PDF) The case hinged on two main things: whether or not Debby Rose is a qualified individual with a disability, and whether or not the monkey (Richard) qualifies as a service animal under the ADA. The court wasn’t able to find any major life activity that Debby Rose was substantially limited in performing because of her disability, and found that most of the monkey’s ‘tasks’ only provided comfort and the others were not related to the claimed disability. Thus, the court found that Debby Rose was not disabled and that the monkey was not a service animal.

It was nice to see such a high profile case resolved appropriately. The public opinion towards service animals has been harmed by such incidents, leading many people to think that the abuse of service animal laws is rampant and that there is nothing businesses can do to prevent being taken advantage of. In this case, all the defendants should be commended not only for excluding a fraudulent and potentially aggressive ‘service animal’ but also for seeing this case all the way through to its final resolution. Too often, businesses faced with an impending lawsuit by a fraudulent service animal user choose to settle the case instead of letting it go to court, which encourages fraudulent users like Debby Rose to continue to abuse existing service animal laws.

I would recommend everyone take a look at the full text of the court's opinion if you have the time. It's an interesting read.

Follow up

As she had indicated after the initial verdict, Debby Rose did appeal the decision. She lost the appeal in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. Their decision can be found here.

--Tiffany Huggard-Lee 13:09, 20 November 2009 (CST)