Emotional support animals don't get any special rights outside of housing, and in limited cases air and train travel. They can't be brought into areas pets are prohibited. You do need to provide verification from a physician or mental health provider to your landlord or the airline for an ESA.

Service dogs(or rarely horses) can generally go anywhere the owner can go including areas pets are prohibited. There is no formal verification, but the owner of the property or their employee can ask if this is a service dog that is required because of a disability, and what tasks it is trained to perform. If it is a cat or other animal, or not trained to perform a task, just to provide support it is not a service dog and they can be refused entry and trespassed.

Registration of service dogs would disenfranchise the disabled. About twice as many don't have photo ID as the general public, many do not own a car or have access to reliable transportation, even relatively small costs can be prohibitive

You are absolutely allowed to ask for verification that an animal is a real service animal, but the people who have been conflating emotional support animals with service animals want you to believe that you can't.

Service animals have to be licensed, trained to perform a task or duty, and be easily identifiable. Misrepresenting an untrained and unlicensed animal as a service animal is fraud and illegal.

Actually, they don't need to be licensed. The only thing a business can ask is what tasks is the service dog trained to be formed.

I do think it would be better off for everyone if there was a license though. I've known people with legitimate service dogs who have had that opinion even. They wish they had a document to prove their legitimacy, as they are constantly asked for a document that doesn't exist.

That requirement always felt weird. I can’t ask what disability a person has, but I can ask what the dog is supposed to do? Because if they say it helps alert to a seizure, I just learned they possibly have chronic seizures without actually asking that.

It's fair because it doesn't set a precedent in other areas. But yes, in practice it's odd.

Oh, thanks for correcting me, I thought there was a license involved in the US, or at least some kind of certification that the animal actually is trained, and that you didn't just slap a vest on your pet poodle...

as CADBOT says, there is no license (or even standards body who could lobby for / issue one). You're allowed to ask what tasks the animal performs, then deny service so long as accommodations are made.

The correct solution is for businesses to grow a backbone and do that for all animals all the time until people gaming the system with fake ESAs give up.

> Service animals have to be licensed

In the US this is not true by the ADA as licensing is a pretty prohibitive cost for many people with disabilities.

I would assume the cost of a license to be much, much smaller than the actual cost of raising and training a service animal?

Generally there are charities/non-profit organizations that will do a lot of the training and help with the ongoing costs of care.

I personally don't see the argument that a separate license is needed or helpful. It's an extra cost and step that's entirely unnecessary. If you want or need a service animal you obviously have to have some way to train it and care for it, but a license is extra. Also if it is ever lost or anything you could be turned away from any public place until it's resolved. I just see it causing more issues for people than it tends to solve.

A know in my state (Minnesota) a lot of places (apartments/condos) require the dog is a service dog, not just designated an "emotional support dog" in order to clamp down on people getting around housing requirements or taking their pets on planes.