{"id":6473,"date":"2012-02-29T09:04:01","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T15:04:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=6473"},"modified":"2012-02-29T09:11:57","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T15:11:57","slug":"skippy-the-therapy-kangaroo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=6473","title":{"rendered":"Skippy the Therapy Kangaroo."},"content":{"rendered":"

This one goes out to Mike the Musicologist, who was a big fan of Skippy when he was younger.<\/p>\n

So there’s a family in the Spring area (near Houston) that has a special needs child. (According to the press coverage, the child is 16 years old; the nature of her special needs is unspecified.)<\/p>\n

In order to assist the child, the family got a service animal for her.<\/p>\n

A service kangaroo.<\/a><\/p>\n

And now the family’s HOA wants the kangaroo gone, asserting it is “not a household pet.”<\/p>\n

I have a hard time deciding who to side with here. I don’t have a high opinion of most HOAs, but I figure they’re a choice you make when you buy a home. However, I question whether this is an enforceable requirement; what defines a “household pet”, and does Federal law trump the HOA restrictions when it comes to “service animals”?<\/p>\n

On the other hand, getting your special needs child a vicious Australian animal (yes, I realize “vicious Australian animal” is redundant) as a “service animal” doesn’t exactly strike me as being the smartest thing in the world, either.<\/p>\n

(Here’s the opening of “Skippy the Bush Kangaroo”<\/a>. Apparently, you can get the first season on DVD, at least in some parts of the world.)<\/p>\n

Edited to add: Actually, you can get the entire series<\/a>\"\" on DVD, but it won’t do you much good unless you live in Australia or have a region-free DVD player.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This one goes out to Mike the Musicologist, who was a big fan of Skippy when he was younger. So there’s a family in the Spring area (near Houston) that has a special needs child. (According to the press coverage, the child is 16 years old; the nature of her special needs is unspecified.) In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,112,23,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-clippings","category-ianal","category-law","category-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6473"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6476,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6473\/revisions\/6476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}