In the category of "you just can't make this stuff up" comes the story of a student, her ferret, and a debate about the nature of disability:

SAN ANTONIO -- A student at Our Lady of the Lake University has filed a complaint, alleging the school is violating her civil rights.

The student asked the Justice Department to find the university in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The complaint centers on Sarah Sevick's service animal, which is a ferret.

Sevick, 19, suffers from a variety of mental disorders and requires the animal to get through her day, much the same way a blind person needs a seeing-eye dog.

"People really don't understand," Sevick said. "They think she's just a pet, but she's working for me."

Sevick's ferret, Lilly, is trained to help her cope with anxiety and panic attacks that can come on at any time.

"She gives me something else to focus on besides what's wrong, and she just stays with me and soothes me and calms me," Sevick said.

Before Lilly came into her life, Sevick's psychiatric problems, including post traumatic stress disorder, kept her from keeping a job and forced her to drop out of college.

With the help of Lilly, Sevick was accepted to Our Lady of the Lake, but Lilly wasn't welcome at the school.

Administrators said they couldn't comment on the situation, but in letters sent to Sevick's mom, they outlined their reasoning, saying they were "unable to conclude her impairment qualifies as a disability."

"I do have a disability," Sevick said. "Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not real."

Via InsideHigherEd.com.

That's it. Looks like I got to find a ferret to bring to work with me.

Wonder how it will get along with all the weasels?

Ferrets are very cute but also controversial. They are against the law as pets in California, for reasons that aren't completely clear, but apparently include that you can't vaccinate them for rabies. It occurs to me that the way to have handled this would be to have an animal that would be fully legal to perform the function, like a dog. Isn't a dog capable of providing reassurance for panic attacks? And the question is also whether the lady's problem actually qualifies as a disability. From the facts given, she could simply be very, very spoiled.

It alsmost sounds like the lady and her family are the sort of pain-in-the-neck people who insist that even the smell of peanuts on an airplane will provoke allergic reasctions, so the airline has to ban peanuts.

The smell of peanuts can invoke allergic reactions. If you can smell something, that means you are inhaling gases or particulates. Peanut allergies are among the most deadly known to man.

Sarah's plight reminds me of "The Fifty-First Dragon". (Here it is, for your reading pleasure. http://www.bartleby.com/237/33.html) I guess a magic word is more convenient than a live ferret. But really, I've known people who have had anxiety problems and they are very hard to deal with. My 80-something-year-old aunt fell and hurt herself quite badly. She healed from that, but now she has a phobia about leaving her house. She can't walk outside without someone on both sides of her to hold her up. Because she gets along inside her house just fine, she knows it's all in her head, and it's irritating and inconvenient to her, but she can't help it. Never having had such a problem myself, I'd be hesitant to cast judgement on somebody else being spoiled, or whatever.

What a perfect opportunity for a pet rock.

If the campus tolerates slatternliness on the part of faculty and students (and the campuses with which I have been familiar tolerate a great deal), it can tolerate this woman's pet.

I always wondered what happened if you had "battling" disabilities - say, you have someone in a class who requires a "service ferret" but you also have someone with severe allergies and asthma, who is sent into an allergic attack by the presence of ferret hair/dander.

Who has to change their class? The person with the ferret or the person who gets sick when in the presence of ferret hair?

What if the person with the ferret allergy is the prof?

(And couldn't this open up things like students saying they need to be allowed to smoke in class because it helps their anxiety on tests, or somesuch? I'm not trying to be offensive but it seems that if we start allowing all kinds of nontraditional "therapies" based on the fact that the person using them say they help, we have to allow lots of other things...)

"They are against the law as pets in California, for reasons that aren't completely clear"

That is completely stupid. Personally I wouldn't recommend a ferret as a pet because they can get hurt so easily (ferrets get into everything and get killed by being sat on while they are under couch cushions, by getting into recliners, all kinds of things really). And another thing: domestic ferrets never lived in the wild. They are a manmade creation, like the domestic dog. There are wild black footed ferrets, but they are very different.