U.S. service animal rules are more flexible, but critics say international standards are a better idea.

By Lois M. Collins

Joschka, the brown-spotted Dalmatian, is welcome on planes, where, during more than 25 international flights, he’s proven he can sit quietly, put off bathroom breaks and mind his own business better than some of the human passengers. The psychiatric service dog has been trained to do all that and more so he can travel with Till-Mathias Jürgens, whose own flights are much smoother now that Joschka comes along.

Joschka is trained to European travel standards, something required of European psychiatric service dogs if they want to fly from place to place. That can be a nasty surprise for Americans flying from the U.S. to a final destination in Europe with a psychiatric service dog. As long as they meet the limited service animal requirements under the American Air Carrier Act, U.S. service dogs can fly in the airplane’s cabin from the U.S. into Europe — but the first stop is as far as they can go in the cabin. If, for example, the plane has a layover en route to Italy, the dog’s not cabin-approved for that second leg. Most airlines require European-standards certification.

Nor is a return trip to the U.S. in the plane cabin guaranteed if airlines require certification.

Jürgens and his wife, Meike Wolff, originally from Hamburg, Germany, don’t think that’s a bad idea. While in general welcoming people with service dogs is “very, very good,” Wolff told the Deseret News, “we often see that a lot of the dogs are not really trained” to high standards. That, she adds, spoils the privilege for a lot of other people who need a psychiatric service dog and have made the effort to train it properly.

That issue is, in fact, why they’re in Utah right now. The couple are here establishing PSD-USA, a branch-off of PSDeurope, a certification program ensuring psychiatric service dogs (that’s the PSD part of the name) are properly trained and can prove it by meeting a set of international and European standards of canine behavior....

https://www.deseret.com/family/2024/04/20/service-dog-airlines-travel-comfort-animal/