Man charged with stomping his own dog at North Station

You can flame me and disagree all you want but I feel a bit bad for the guy if his plea on gofundme is halfway true. If you have a chaotic life as a homeless person with PTSD, working your way through Social Security, disability and other bureaucracies is almost impossible to navigate. There is a list that's several years long to get out of a shelter and into an apartment in Boston. It's a terrible situation all around.

That said, where/why/how did he get a purebred Siberian Husky puppy and then not be able to afford to get her into a service dog training program? Why not work with some social service agency to get an already trained service dog?

As for housing discrimination, the laws are clear. You can't put a "Service Dog in Training" coat on a dog and tell a potential landlord you're training the dog yourself. Landlords cannot refuse housing for true service animals but Sarah isn't one. She's a companion pet.

Maybe a switch flipped in his brain, he freaked out and went after the dog. I have anxiety and one of the ways it manifests itself is rage. I can't tell you how many times I have wanted to punch a wall during an anxiety attack.

I'm not giving him a get out of jail card, I'm saying take the dog away, get him the treatment he needs and get him into a shelter. It's nice to have a pet who makes you feel loved when you think no one else loves you but if you don't love that pet back then you don't deserve that kind of unconditional love.

n/t

... about spending time with people who have personally been to hell and back, or who have at least stood at the gates of hell and turned away; people who have done battle with their personal demons and emerged victorious. Drunks who have been sober for years. Addicts who have been off drugs for years. People who were formerly going nowhere who are now making something out of their lives.. Vets with PTSD or other damage.

Every one of them whom I've met has been, at the core, profoundly sympathetic toward people I might call deranged loser assholes. Not that they excuse the bad behavior -- far from it; most are quite strict about not tolerating it around themselves. While they might keep their distance from those who are out of control, I never hear them write a person off.

There are all sorts of platitudes about hard times wearing down some of our hard edges, but there may be something to it.

It is less about making poor life decisions than being (or being born into) in life circumstances that may influence you (or screw you up) to make poor life decisions. Some of those life circumstances may be within the control of the person but most likely are not.

I think we can do better to label people as "a loser" and "these jerks". Those who are mentally ill, in one form or another, have a disease. It does excuse their behavior, by a long short. Compassion and empathy is what we need more of, Patricia, not judgement.

Not to be pedantic (too late?), but I do think it is important to get these terms right. Any pet and owner meeting certain criteria can be trained as a Therapy Animal, but this is yet another discrete designation that should not be confused with that of Emotional Support Animal. A Therapy Animal and owner might visit nursing homes, for example, but that owner need not necessarily suffer from a disability. Anyone curious might want to Google these very specific legal terms - they are not interchangeable: Companion Animal (pet), Emotional Support Animal, Service Animal, and Therapy Animal. I have seen too much hostility and resentment caused by misunderstandings of this terminology- hence this post.