Can You Eat Your Emotional Support Animal

Say you were able to get a fatty pet turkey certified to be an ESA and thanksgiving roles around. Say this is also Wyoming where there aren’t animal abuse laws. Could you eat an ESA?

Also since people use food as therapy and one of the key aspects of an ESA is their Therapeutic value. Could the cooked turkey  pass as an ESA if it was formally certified?

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I found this to be an interesting, if frivolous set of questions, so here we go, employing the caveat that I’m not an attorney, and certainly not your attorney.

Question 1: Can I retain an exotic animal, such as a turkey, as an emotional support animal (ESA) and assert the privileges that come with that under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)? The answer is an unequivocal yes. Provided that a letter is signed by a certified mental health professional on the professional’s letterhead saying that the animal is an ESA, the animal is considered an ESA and is entitled to those privileges, mostly under the ADA and the Fair Housing Act. In one instance, USA Today reported that someone successfully claimed a turkey as an ESA on an airplane flight (https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/roadwarriorvoices/2016/01/12/pass…).

Question 2: If I kept this ESA-designated turkey as a pet in the state of Wyoming, would any law prohibit me from eating it?

No. I believe you mischaracterized WY law when you said it has no animal cruelty statutes. It does, and they say that you can’t be involved in cockfighting, dogfighting, torturing animals, and destroying them using certain methods. There is no blanket prohibition on destroying animals, or even destroying household pet animals, which means it would likely be legal to destroy your pet turkey and eat it; you would just need to go about everything humanely. In any case, it probably wouldn’t be wise to tell anyone that you had pursued this course of action. Cheers

 

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