What to do emotional support animal

[James Kirby]

Hello all, 

i have a tenant that has a dog that was on a Pet Addendum. However, after a few issues with not having the dog on a leash, dog waste not being cleaned up, and the tenant against my permission putting up an outdoor dogrun and leaving the dog out barking at night (tenant complaint), I revoked the Pet Addendum. Well, said tenant now has a doctors note stating that this is an emotional support animal. 

this tenant has been served 3 days on the following:

Waste not cleaning up waste. 

Neusance dog barking all hours of the night. 

breaking lease due to putting up the dog run on property and not keeping pet on leash.  

Do I need to allow this tenant to have a Pet even after they have broken all rules and had this revoked?

Thanks in advance for your time and advice. 

[Anna Sagatelova]

Even if there is a legitimate assistance animal, including ESA, the tenant is responsible to follow reasonable rules, including disposing of pet waste and keeping dog on leash. 

I recommend you have all tenants complete a petscreening.com profile. They have 3 categories: companion animal (pet), assistance animal (service animal or ESA), and no animal. This keeps things straight as far as categories, scares off a lot of phonies, and also helps you by determining the legitimacy of an ESA - all free of charge to you. Tenant only pays for a companion animal profile.

In this case, I do recommend you reach out to a local attorney who specializes in Fair Housing (it's not an ADA issue!!!) to determine if you can still ask them to go through this profile process for the ESA. In the meantime, do not charge any pet fees but continue to enforce the basic reasonable terms of your lease like "clean up pet waste".

Your lease should dictate the tenant's behavior, irrespective of the kind of animal that tenant has, if any. No waste in the yard is permitted.

I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.