One thing that will never cease to amaze is the raw dishonesty that intolerance is so often accompanied by. Indeed, we don’t discriminate because we discriminate; we discriminate because there’s an inner discomfort that we’re trying to deflect, and pointing a finger at something you don’t immediately understand is the band-aid solution to end all band-aid solutions.
And so is it really any surprise that this college professor could only go so long without succumbing to the sweetness of TikTok‘s @daisy.thehedgehog1?
It’s an eight-second story that could have only ever had one ending. Daisy’s owner, a college student, was told that Daisy wasn’t allowed to come to the classroom on account of her being too distracting (an admittedly fair accusation at a glance, given Daisy’s pristine, prickly perfection). This is, of course, ridiculous, not only because Daisy is entitled to a legitimate education as much as any hardworking, idealistic mammal, but because she has a duty to fulfill as her owner’s emotional support hedgehog.
Then the professor actually got to meet Daisy personally, with our spiky subject soon shuffling around the palm of her would-be oppressor, and he had a change of heart in the blink of an eye. Could it be that his prejudice against emotional support hedgehogs was largely influenced by the fact that he didn’t know any emotional support hedgehogs in his personal life? Who would’ve thought?
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, all the commenters were Team Daisy right from the jump. Some vowed to sacrifice their lives for Daisy if the situation ever called for it, while others admitted that they would try making friends with Daisy’s owner in real life solely for the privilege of enhanced hedgehog proximity. One user in particular recounted her own experience with pet-professor friendships, wherein she brought her cat to class one (1) time, and the professor proceeded to mark the cat as absent for every day that she didn’t bring it to class.
But some of you still might not be convinced. Indeed, does the “emotional support” label automatically legitimize the presence of any animal in a setting that might not be socially acceptable for them to inhabit otherwise? Well, not quite. According to the T.H. Chan School of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts, any domesticated animal is allowed to be an emotional support animal, which can include cats, dogs, mice, rabbits, birds, hedgehogs(!), rats, minipigs, ferrets, and even miniature horses. The only requirement is that they don’t cause any mayhem and are generally manageable in public, so don’t expect any emotional support coyotes or elephants or mountain goats.
The page also specifies that emotional support animals are different from pets, reassuring us that anyone is allowed to own a pet regardless of whether they provide alleviation for their owner’s mental health condition, which itself is not a prerequisite for owning a pet, and alleviating such things is not the job of a pet. I’m mostly telling you this because there’s something profoundly and perhaps uncannily funny about the fact that someone felt the need to specify these things about pet ownership on a university website.