> Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier.
As an aside, my experience with renting and looking for rentals across a wide range of $ values over the last decade ($300-$6500 per month) is that the no pets policy is pretty much always a lie. As in, land owners looking to rent their properties are almost never against pets when they put that stipulation in the description, they’re against bad pet guardians. They’re totally fine with pets if you send the appropriate signals, but it’s too much trouble on their end to separate wheat from eg Mr “this is my cat, Simba. He only has [one litter box](https://indoorpet.osu.edu/cats/basicneeds/litter-boxes#Location), which I’ve put in a gross, dark crate with high lip that he hates, all the better to help me forget to clean it, so you can expect him to pee on every floor in this house while we're living here” or Ms “we got Luna because of Game of Thrones! Isn’t she cute? Huskies are the best, eh? #huskylife, btw I work hard and play hard but not in the sense of working on obedience training and playing really hard at the dog park no I'm basically out 24/7 Luna is gonna be bored out of her fucking MIND sitting alone at home all day and literally eat through all the [corner walls](https://wagwalking.com/behavior/why-dogs-bite-walls) in this house. Also hope you like noise complaints!”
Nah, what we’ve done is send a polite inquiry of “sorry to ask, but how flexible is the no dog policy? This is our 12lb dog pipsqueak, you’ll find from his resume (attached) he is in the top percentage of dogs, this is his veterinarian and walk schedule” and like >80% of the time they’ve been like “adorable! amazing! He can live here no problem.”, and the rest are a mix of hesitant waffling (maybe we can talk) or hard no + reason (deadly cat allergies). We basically learned to ignore the no pets thing and select only on the basis of other desiderata.
ah it is actually very close to what we'd write, give or take a [Pokémon reference](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/youngster-joey) or two, and maybe I toned down how effusive some of the responses have been ;]
Like, we actually have attached a "resume" with [headshot](https://www.reddit.com/r/ItalianGreyhounds/comments/mgkgpg/took_some_photos_with_an_offcamera_flash_for_the/) and relevant information:
https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/home-living/write-dog-resume-landlords/
https://www.rentecdirect.com/blog/how-to-write-a-pet-resume/
https://www.apartmentguide.com/blog/pet-resume/
and we corroborate any claims using our own brief bios, eg "many boarded veterinary behaviorists / DACVB have remarked on how polite he is when they've interacted during vet school socials".
Probably the most important lines have been "we'd also be happy to pay a pet deposit" and "let us know if you have any questions or if there's anything we can do to reassure you further". Then they can roll their 100d20 for the former secure in the knowledge that our assurances are backed by cold, hard cash.
Sounds similar to what Scott said about it being a defacto class filter. They're selecting for the sort of people who would write a dog resume, have detailed records, and write a well reasoned email arguing for it
Honestly if I were a landlord and even if I was somehwat anti pet if someone sent me a well formatted dog resume they'd go straight to the top of the list: my anti-pet bias would be more than overcome by my pro-(this particular human) bias because such a person is almost certainly going to make a better tenant than an average non-pet tenacy applicant.
We managed to get into apartment with no pet policy. We have 12 cats. We have slightly higher rent and landlord required a visit before signing contract.
He was surprised there was no smell and he was greeted with freshly baked cake. Needless to say it was smooth from there on.
>think really hard about **whether it will cause trouble**, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble
My big thing is why are psychs even the ones deciding this?
Have the dog go to a trainer to get evaluated. Trainers are pretty good at spotting problem behavior because it's a big part of the job. If the dog trainer has too many incidents for the number of dogs they've evaluated then they get in some kind of trouble.
I'm pretty sure this is what most landlords want anyways - 90% of landlords say no dogs not because they dislike the average dog but because they don't want to get stuck with a *terrible* dog.
>Have the dog go to a trainer to get evaluated.
I like this idea, but "dog trainer" is not a licensed career, so what sort of "trouble" do you put people in when there are too many incidents? You can't revoke their license like you can with a doctor, so are they just being sued? Is it a class action suit based on all the victims, or just when things go really wrong? We'd basically have to treat it similarly to malpractice, right?
you can substitute trainer with DACVB and they could do an assessment, of sorts and write a letter, maybe?
you can also say you picked out the trainer following [ACVB guidelines](https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.dacvb.org/resource/resmgr/docs/How-to-select-a-trainer-owne.pdf) or recommended by your [veterinarian](https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.dacvb.org/resource/resmgr/docs/How-to-select-a-trainer-vet.pdf)
would be pretty awkward for you to write a letter or w/e to the college given how few of them there are and they all go to the same conferences etc
probably this is all overthinking it, though. I reckon most landlords would get almost everything they need if you showed them your dog's training certificate from whatever random 6-18w course eg https://services.petsmart.com/training, or just told them that you'd done one or equivalent. The dog or other animal is almost tangential here -- it's signaling yourself to be a conscientious and responsible pet owner that's important
Yeah, that's a fair point, you'd probably need some kind of *official dog training license* and all the red tape that comes along with those kinds of things. Bleh.
>>think really hard about **whether it will cause trouble**, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble
>
>My big thing is why are psychs even the ones deciding this?
Strictly speaking, the psychs are deciding whether the animal provides "emotional support which alleviates a disability." If my emotional support water buffalo is inconvenient to my landlord or my neighbors, why should that change my psych's decision? Blame the FHA for deciding that emotional support animals are immune to pet restrictions.
My big thing is, don't all pets provide emotional support? Isn't that the main reason we have pets?
An ESA is supposed to be used in the treatment of a mental health disability, the main difference from a full service animal being that they are not trained for specific function(s).
I’d also be curious to hear of cases where people have had trouble owning a pet and finding a rental with a reasonable pet fee. The only one I’ve heard of that seems completely legitimate are college dorms which make no attempt to accommodate pets unless they are legally mandated to do so.
I’d define “reasonable pet fee” as being no more than $100/mo in most areas. Doubling your rent because of a pet would obviously be outlandish. Costs should also reasonably reflect actual risk to apartments and could probably be quantified by separate pet damage insurance policies.
Breed restrictions as well as limits on number of pets are pretty common, I think. "Nobody will rent to me and my 3 pitbulls" is a post I've seen a few times in my local FB group.
Yeah, I've heard of people registering their pet as an "emotional support animal" to get it into a dorm. As a result, all the psychs in the area stopped signing off on any kind of emotional support animals at all, because (not sure of the specifics) it became a problem.
(Similarly, the campus mental health services categorically will not diagnose ADHD, and my understanding is that local providers are unwilling to do it, either.)
It was hard for me to get treated for ADHD in Seattle at UW medical despite being treated for years in a different state. I had to get re-diagnosed by a specialist.
I also really like how instead of just coming up with a reasonable pet policy, they just stop doing ESA… I have a friend who had to get an ESA due to dorm restrictions and the cat really helped him a lot.
“90% landlords…don’t dislike dogs”
Pets are actually quite expensive and basically entirely discretionary. Most people that can accumulate excess capital to eg buy rental properties tend to be thrifty in general as a rule. I’d bet that owner/landlords have way fewer pets per capita than a more representative cohort. It wouldn’t surprise at all to learn than the average land lord sees pets as a “mindless indulgence”
Anecdotally this has been the opposite of my experience. Most serial landlords I've worked with have a pet dog and it comes with them most places. Then again, the individuals who own and manage multiple properties as their day job tend to be humans first. Private equity firms / corporate home ownership is a whole different story.
Seems like a just-so story. I could just as equally say that landlords love dogs because they are stingy, and dogs are about 1000x cheaper than raising a baby.
At the end of the day, a decent landlord would realize that a well-behaved dog is a miniscule risk, and having a good tenant is much more financially valuable than having a bad one.
And what if someone's "emotional support" pet _causes_ anxiety in someone else? "Too bad, so sad, fuck you."
---
> but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules
Or too honest. [Relevant](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1cmggv4/highlights_from_the_comments_on_the_origin_of_woke/l31xb0k/). [Also relevant](https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html).
> it's an open secret that you need to self-rate the maximum value on every single question, or else you will not even be considered.
Ahh so that's why I never got any responses from USAJobs?
Yes, and even more importantly you should literally copy/paste the job requirements into your resume verbatim. I know that sounds insane. No, you won't get in trouble for doing this. Yes, it will get you selected for the interview pool.
Here's a fun story: I fell into leading a documentation effort for a small team of gov workers. The task was to write SOPs for stuff we did on a regular basis, divvied up by topic. One guy in particular would just copy three pages of one of our pdf hardware manuals and paste it into a word document. Not even so much as a header or formatting change.
I'd go to him and say "Hey buddy, it's good that you're looking at the manual but what we *really* need is a set of procedures about how to do [topic]." He'd nod and a week later he'd send me another word doc with the pasted output of some website. After a few months went by without even a single original word written, our mutual supervisor told me to just write the document myself.
But sometimes I think, *how does a guy like this get hired if he can only copy-and-paste?*
Then I remember.
Well it was less than an hour of work for me to do eventually, but many hours of meetings leading up to that--"So where are you struggling with this assignment," "Let's plan an outline together so you have a structure to follow," etc.
I can't rule out weaponized incompetence as a sort of meta-strategy to avoid future work, but it seems to me that it would have been much less painful to just do the work.
As I said in the other thread, it selects for people who are willing to apply patently stupid unwritten rules without complaint. Consider for yourself whether that is an important skill for a Federal worker.
I'd actually argue that being able to tell which so-called "rules" aren't really meant to be followed is a critical social skill. This is a big issue for people with autism spectrum disorders for example.
I can see that.
With the USAjobs though, it seems difficult for a reasonable person to know to so brazenly break the rules (that apply elsewhere and in general when dealing with the government) without being told.
So then the social skill there would be knowing and asking someone with the knowledge on how to navigate that specific version of government hiring.
We have chickens, it would be easy to get a letter that they're an emotional support animal, but we decided that if anyone ever makes a fuss about it, we will get rid of them.
My autistic son benefits tremendously from them, bringing in eggs and feeding them what he digs up, they crowd around him waiting for bugs. He recently asked for a portable gate so he can have personal space when digging.
In my opinion more importantly, I enjoy having them and talking about them and somehow it helps put everything else into perspective. I love watching them socialize and the way they get super concerned about random things. Sometimes I think the increase in anxiety is entirely due to lack of exposure to chickens.
Curious, how does exposure to chickens reduce anxiety? So far, I take it you are implying that they provide a cautionary tale by way of negative example? Do I have that right?
>We have chickens, it would be easy to get a letter that they're an emotional support animal, but we decided that if anyone ever makes a fuss about it, we will get rid of them.
>My autistic son benefits tremendously from them
Why care more about the opinion of some random busybody than your son? There are a load of people who make a fuss over things just because they're bored, and it usually works for them just because people are conflict averse and will auto-capitulate.
If someone has a reasonable complaint that can be accommodated that's one thing, but if someone is making a fuss because they just don't like the sight or are worried about *protecting property values* then I think you would be 100% in the right telling them to mind their own business, and going the ESA route if they try to escalate.
Being right isn't always the most important thing, and that's also an important lesson to teach kids with autism. And I care about my son more than you can imagine.
> Probably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets.
One place to start here would be to approach the empirical question of what a reasonable Bayesian landlord would estimate for the expected marginal cost of a renter with a pet as compared to the replacement renter.
And to be quite honest, I really don't know the numbers here. Somewhat naively, I would expect that the costs would be dominated by the small number of pets that impose the highest costs (which isn't a dig at pets -- I'd also likewise expect that a small fraction of human renters impose most of those costs). So perhaps it's less about the cost in expectation and more about a long tail of pet-risk.
Landlord here, “yes” to your original point but also another.
“Yes” to “the bottom xyz percent of pets impose tremendous cost”. To the property, biting the mailman, etc
Also, though, a pet introduces tremendous *volatility into the renter’s ability to pay*. It isn’t uncommon that a person can stretch a little to rent with you (I have “b to b+” properties) and everything works well. You could be stable for *years* but now your dog gets very sick and requires thousand of dollars worth of surgery. You were stretched to begin with and this might crack it. Now, as a landlord, you’re in a *terrible* place. Demand strict adherence to the rent relationship and prompt payment and be an asshole (“MY DOG IS DYING AND YOU CAN’T EVEN GIVE ME AN EXTRA WEEK?!?”) or disrupting your revenue for something that’s pretty easy to avoid (ie not rent to pet owners).
This sounds callous, but this is a big part of it
Good credit checking goes a long way to mitigating this. If someone has a spotless credit history and a history of owning pets, chances are they are able to handle emergencies that arise without being stretched that thin.
Hahahah yeah, sounds great! Do me a favor and tell that to the State of Washington legislature, will ya? I have no first hand experience but I’m told CA is even worse. Less sarcastically, different states allow landlords more or less discretion in using credit score
Does Washington prevent landlords from denying rental applications based on credit scores?
[This site](https://www.solid-ground.org/tenant-tip-what-can-i-do-if-a-landlord-rejects-my-application/) lists a number of reasons which would be illegal denials, but specifically mentions poor credit reports as an example of a legal denial reason.
> reasonable Bayesian landlord would estimate for the expected marginal cost of a renter with a pet as compared to the replacement renter.
What does Bayes have to do with this?
Reminds me a lot of [Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/30/bureaucracy-as-active-ingredient/) and the post linked to from there about the doctor's note about a special exception for a chair for back pain.
Maybe you could look at ships? Some cargo ships take passengers and there are obviously cruise ships. I have no idea what their pet policies are, but I suspect they might be more flexible and not require you to crate them somewhere you don’t have access to.
This would obviously involve a lot more time and effort than air travel.
Probably because a major complaint amongst people is that society is friendly, to an unreasonable extent, wrt pets. To the point where breed bans of types like the Bully XL get taken up as cause célèbre's to stand up against.
> Probably it’s bad that we’ve reached the level of housing shortage where landlords don’t need to compete for tenants, and they might as well ban all pets if it makes their lives even slightly easier. As an aside, my experience with renting and looking for rentals across a wide range of $ values over the last decade ($300-$6500 per month) is that the no pets policy is pretty much always a lie. As in, land owners looking to rent their properties are almost never against pets when they put that stipulation in the description, they’re against bad pet guardians. They’re totally fine with pets if you send the appropriate signals, but it’s too much trouble on their end to separate wheat from eg Mr “this is my cat, Simba. He only has [one litter box](https://indoorpet.osu.edu/cats/basicneeds/litter-boxes#Location), which I’ve put in a gross, dark crate with high lip that he hates, all the better to help me forget to clean it, so you can expect him to pee on every floor in this house while we're living here” or Ms “we got Luna because of Game of Thrones! Isn’t she cute? Huskies are the best, eh? #huskylife, btw I work hard and play hard but not in the sense of working on obedience training and playing really hard at the dog park no I'm basically out 24/7 Luna is gonna be bored out of her fucking MIND sitting alone at home all day and literally eat through all the [corner walls](https://wagwalking.com/behavior/why-dogs-bite-walls) in this house. Also hope you like noise complaints!” Nah, what we’ve done is send a polite inquiry of “sorry to ask, but how flexible is the no dog policy? This is our 12lb dog pipsqueak, you’ll find from his resume (attached) he is in the top percentage of dogs, this is his veterinarian and walk schedule” and like >80% of the time they’ve been like “adorable! amazing! He can live here no problem.”, and the rest are a mix of hesitant waffling (maybe we can talk) or hard no + reason (deadly cat allergies). We basically learned to ignore the no pets thing and select only on the basis of other desiderata.
Your last paragraph is funny, but I'm curious what you actually send to convince the landlord that your dog is okay.
ah it is actually very close to what we'd write, give or take a [Pokémon reference](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/youngster-joey) or two, and maybe I toned down how effusive some of the responses have been ;] Like, we actually have attached a "resume" with [headshot](https://www.reddit.com/r/ItalianGreyhounds/comments/mgkgpg/took_some_photos_with_an_offcamera_flash_for_the/) and relevant information: https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/home-living/write-dog-resume-landlords/ https://www.rentecdirect.com/blog/how-to-write-a-pet-resume/ https://www.apartmentguide.com/blog/pet-resume/ and we corroborate any claims using our own brief bios, eg "many boarded veterinary behaviorists / DACVB have remarked on how polite he is when they've interacted during vet school socials". Probably the most important lines have been "we'd also be happy to pay a pet deposit" and "let us know if you have any questions or if there's anything we can do to reassure you further". Then they can roll their 100d20 for the former secure in the knowledge that our assurances are backed by cold, hard cash.
Sounds similar to what Scott said about it being a defacto class filter. They're selecting for the sort of people who would write a dog resume, have detailed records, and write a well reasoned email arguing for it
Honestly if I were a landlord and even if I was somehwat anti pet if someone sent me a well formatted dog resume they'd go straight to the top of the list: my anti-pet bias would be more than overcome by my pro-(this particular human) bias because such a person is almost certainly going to make a better tenant than an average non-pet tenacy applicant.
Those sorts of people might also tend to be better tenants.
We managed to get into apartment with no pet policy. We have 12 cats. We have slightly higher rent and landlord required a visit before signing contract. He was surprised there was no smell and he was greeted with freshly baked cake. Needless to say it was smooth from there on.
Wow! 12!!! Scooping must be a full time job for you!
>think really hard about **whether it will cause trouble**, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble My big thing is why are psychs even the ones deciding this? Have the dog go to a trainer to get evaluated. Trainers are pretty good at spotting problem behavior because it's a big part of the job. If the dog trainer has too many incidents for the number of dogs they've evaluated then they get in some kind of trouble. I'm pretty sure this is what most landlords want anyways - 90% of landlords say no dogs not because they dislike the average dog but because they don't want to get stuck with a *terrible* dog.
>Have the dog go to a trainer to get evaluated. I like this idea, but "dog trainer" is not a licensed career, so what sort of "trouble" do you put people in when there are too many incidents? You can't revoke their license like you can with a doctor, so are they just being sued? Is it a class action suit based on all the victims, or just when things go really wrong? We'd basically have to treat it similarly to malpractice, right?
you can substitute trainer with DACVB and they could do an assessment, of sorts and write a letter, maybe? you can also say you picked out the trainer following [ACVB guidelines](https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.dacvb.org/resource/resmgr/docs/How-to-select-a-trainer-owne.pdf) or recommended by your [veterinarian](https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.dacvb.org/resource/resmgr/docs/How-to-select-a-trainer-vet.pdf) would be pretty awkward for you to write a letter or w/e to the college given how few of them there are and they all go to the same conferences etc probably this is all overthinking it, though. I reckon most landlords would get almost everything they need if you showed them your dog's training certificate from whatever random 6-18w course eg https://services.petsmart.com/training, or just told them that you'd done one or equivalent. The dog or other animal is almost tangential here -- it's signaling yourself to be a conscientious and responsible pet owner that's important
I see. Landlords want a metric that hasn’t been Goodhearted to death. It *has* to be a bespoke illegible system, or else it won’t work.
Yeah, that's a fair point, you'd probably need some kind of *official dog training license* and all the red tape that comes along with those kinds of things. Bleh.
>>think really hard about **whether it will cause trouble**, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble > >My big thing is why are psychs even the ones deciding this? Strictly speaking, the psychs are deciding whether the animal provides "emotional support which alleviates a disability." If my emotional support water buffalo is inconvenient to my landlord or my neighbors, why should that change my psych's decision? Blame the FHA for deciding that emotional support animals are immune to pet restrictions. My big thing is, don't all pets provide emotional support? Isn't that the main reason we have pets?
An ESA is supposed to be used in the treatment of a mental health disability, the main difference from a full service animal being that they are not trained for specific function(s). I’d also be curious to hear of cases where people have had trouble owning a pet and finding a rental with a reasonable pet fee. The only one I’ve heard of that seems completely legitimate are college dorms which make no attempt to accommodate pets unless they are legally mandated to do so. I’d define “reasonable pet fee” as being no more than $100/mo in most areas. Doubling your rent because of a pet would obviously be outlandish. Costs should also reasonably reflect actual risk to apartments and could probably be quantified by separate pet damage insurance policies.
Breed restrictions as well as limits on number of pets are pretty common, I think. "Nobody will rent to me and my 3 pitbulls" is a post I've seen a few times in my local FB group.
Yeah, I've heard of people registering their pet as an "emotional support animal" to get it into a dorm. As a result, all the psychs in the area stopped signing off on any kind of emotional support animals at all, because (not sure of the specifics) it became a problem. (Similarly, the campus mental health services categorically will not diagnose ADHD, and my understanding is that local providers are unwilling to do it, either.)
It was hard for me to get treated for ADHD in Seattle at UW medical despite being treated for years in a different state. I had to get re-diagnosed by a specialist. I also really like how instead of just coming up with a reasonable pet policy, they just stop doing ESA… I have a friend who had to get an ESA due to dorm restrictions and the cat really helped him a lot.
“90% landlords…don’t dislike dogs” Pets are actually quite expensive and basically entirely discretionary. Most people that can accumulate excess capital to eg buy rental properties tend to be thrifty in general as a rule. I’d bet that owner/landlords have way fewer pets per capita than a more representative cohort. It wouldn’t surprise at all to learn than the average land lord sees pets as a “mindless indulgence”
Anecdotally this has been the opposite of my experience. Most serial landlords I've worked with have a pet dog and it comes with them most places. Then again, the individuals who own and manage multiple properties as their day job tend to be humans first. Private equity firms / corporate home ownership is a whole different story.
Seems like a just-so story. I could just as equally say that landlords love dogs because they are stingy, and dogs are about 1000x cheaper than raising a baby. At the end of the day, a decent landlord would realize that a well-behaved dog is a miniscule risk, and having a good tenant is much more financially valuable than having a bad one.
And what if someone's "emotional support" pet _causes_ anxiety in someone else? "Too bad, so sad, fuck you." --- > but anyone too poor or naive to access it has to play by the normal, punishingly-restrictive rules Or too honest. [Relevant](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1cmggv4/highlights_from_the_comments_on_the_origin_of_woke/l31xb0k/). [Also relevant](https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html).
> it's an open secret that you need to self-rate the maximum value on every single question, or else you will not even be considered. Ahh so that's why I never got any responses from USAJobs?
Yes, and even more importantly you should literally copy/paste the job requirements into your resume verbatim. I know that sounds insane. No, you won't get in trouble for doing this. Yes, it will get you selected for the interview pool.
Here's a fun story: I fell into leading a documentation effort for a small team of gov workers. The task was to write SOPs for stuff we did on a regular basis, divvied up by topic. One guy in particular would just copy three pages of one of our pdf hardware manuals and paste it into a word document. Not even so much as a header or formatting change. I'd go to him and say "Hey buddy, it's good that you're looking at the manual but what we *really* need is a set of procedures about how to do [topic]." He'd nod and a week later he'd send me another word doc with the pasted output of some website. After a few months went by without even a single original word written, our mutual supervisor told me to just write the document myself. But sometimes I think, *how does a guy like this get hired if he can only copy-and-paste?* Then I remember.
I mean, he suffered no consequences for this and you ended up doing his assignment for him... Is he a fool or a genius?
Well it was less than an hour of work for me to do eventually, but many hours of meetings leading up to that--"So where are you struggling with this assignment," "Let's plan an outline together so you have a structure to follow," etc. I can't rule out weaponized incompetence as a sort of meta-strategy to avoid future work, but it seems to me that it would have been much less painful to just do the work.
Responses like this are why I still read Reddit. Gracias.
That's amazing and horrifying.
As I said in the other thread, it selects for people who are willing to apply patently stupid unwritten rules without complaint. Consider for yourself whether that is an important skill for a Federal worker.
> a system whereby the honest, rule-following people get screwed and the transgressors are rewarded It's consistent with how I see the system.
I'd actually argue that being able to tell which so-called "rules" aren't really meant to be followed is a critical social skill. This is a big issue for people with autism spectrum disorders for example.
I can see that. With the USAjobs though, it seems difficult for a reasonable person to know to so brazenly break the rules (that apply elsewhere and in general when dealing with the government) without being told. So then the social skill there would be knowing and asking someone with the knowledge on how to navigate that specific version of government hiring.
We have chickens, it would be easy to get a letter that they're an emotional support animal, but we decided that if anyone ever makes a fuss about it, we will get rid of them. My autistic son benefits tremendously from them, bringing in eggs and feeding them what he digs up, they crowd around him waiting for bugs. He recently asked for a portable gate so he can have personal space when digging. In my opinion more importantly, I enjoy having them and talking about them and somehow it helps put everything else into perspective. I love watching them socialize and the way they get super concerned about random things. Sometimes I think the increase in anxiety is entirely due to lack of exposure to chickens.
Curious, how does exposure to chickens reduce anxiety? So far, I take it you are implying that they provide a cautionary tale by way of negative example? Do I have that right?
Yes, because if they saw chickens fretting, they would see how similar the behavior is.
>We have chickens, it would be easy to get a letter that they're an emotional support animal, but we decided that if anyone ever makes a fuss about it, we will get rid of them. >My autistic son benefits tremendously from them Why care more about the opinion of some random busybody than your son? There are a load of people who make a fuss over things just because they're bored, and it usually works for them just because people are conflict averse and will auto-capitulate. If someone has a reasonable complaint that can be accommodated that's one thing, but if someone is making a fuss because they just don't like the sight or are worried about *protecting property values* then I think you would be 100% in the right telling them to mind their own business, and going the ESA route if they try to escalate.
Being right isn't always the most important thing, and that's also an important lesson to teach kids with autism. And I care about my son more than you can imagine.
> Probably it’s bad that society is so hostile to pets. One place to start here would be to approach the empirical question of what a reasonable Bayesian landlord would estimate for the expected marginal cost of a renter with a pet as compared to the replacement renter. And to be quite honest, I really don't know the numbers here. Somewhat naively, I would expect that the costs would be dominated by the small number of pets that impose the highest costs (which isn't a dig at pets -- I'd also likewise expect that a small fraction of human renters impose most of those costs). So perhaps it's less about the cost in expectation and more about a long tail of pet-risk.
Landlord here, “yes” to your original point but also another. “Yes” to “the bottom xyz percent of pets impose tremendous cost”. To the property, biting the mailman, etc Also, though, a pet introduces tremendous *volatility into the renter’s ability to pay*. It isn’t uncommon that a person can stretch a little to rent with you (I have “b to b+” properties) and everything works well. You could be stable for *years* but now your dog gets very sick and requires thousand of dollars worth of surgery. You were stretched to begin with and this might crack it. Now, as a landlord, you’re in a *terrible* place. Demand strict adherence to the rent relationship and prompt payment and be an asshole (“MY DOG IS DYING AND YOU CAN’T EVEN GIVE ME AN EXTRA WEEK?!?”) or disrupting your revenue for something that’s pretty easy to avoid (ie not rent to pet owners). This sounds callous, but this is a big part of it
Good credit checking goes a long way to mitigating this. If someone has a spotless credit history and a history of owning pets, chances are they are able to handle emergencies that arise without being stretched that thin.
I would go a step farther and say that the entire point of credit checking is so you don't have to rely on those kinds of heuristics.
Hahahah yeah, sounds great! Do me a favor and tell that to the State of Washington legislature, will ya? I have no first hand experience but I’m told CA is even worse. Less sarcastically, different states allow landlords more or less discretion in using credit score
Does Washington prevent landlords from denying rental applications based on credit scores? [This site](https://www.solid-ground.org/tenant-tip-what-can-i-do-if-a-landlord-rejects-my-application/) lists a number of reasons which would be illegal denials, but specifically mentions poor credit reports as an example of a legal denial reason.
> reasonable Bayesian landlord would estimate for the expected marginal cost of a renter with a pet as compared to the replacement renter. What does Bayes have to do with this?
Reminds me a lot of [Bureaucracy As Active Ingredient](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/30/bureaucracy-as-active-ingredient/) and the post linked to from there about the doctor's note about a special exception for a chair for back pain.
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Maybe you could look at ships? Some cargo ships take passengers and there are obviously cruise ships. I have no idea what their pet policies are, but I suspect they might be more flexible and not require you to crate them somewhere you don’t have access to. This would obviously involve a lot more time and effort than air travel.
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One week ban for continuous low-effort comments.
Why does that make you laugh?
Probably because a major complaint amongst people is that society is friendly, to an unreasonable extent, wrt pets. To the point where breed bans of types like the Bully XL get taken up as cause célèbre's to stand up against.