Service Dog Sally caught on video abusing service dog handler for not letting her 2 year old daughter pat Megan Stoff’s service dog at a Pittsburg mall.
A mother has found herself in the hot-seat after viral video showed her screaming at a service dog handler for not allowing her toddler daughter to pat a service dog.
In the altercation filmed on December 19, Megan Stoff was with a golden retriever, Nala, at a busy Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania shopping mall, when the mother and her young daughter approached them.
Asking if her daughter could pet the working pooch, Megan and a co-worker told the mother ‘no’, as petting a service dog can interfere with its training.
Allegedly, just minutes later, after walking away the woman returned in a rage and began shouting at Megan and her co-workers.
Megan decided to begin filming the outburst, with the clip having since been watched 6.4 million times.
Megan Stoff: ‘Entitlement these days is real’.
Video captured under the handle, ML Leigh shows the mother saying, ‘That was definitely very rude how she talked to me.
‘Firstly you should have a sign [saying not to touch the dog], and secondly she should not have said “no”, she could’ve said “sorry the dog is in training”, that would’ve been nicer.’
Megan tells the woman to walk away, and points out Nala’s vest has the words ‘Please do not pet me I’m working’ written on both sides of it, along with ‘Do not touch’ and ‘Do not pet’.
She adds that it’s illegal to ‘harass a service dog’.
At some point- the unidentified mother realizes she’s being filmed (and about to become the next social media sensation) with tensions escalating further when she threatens to call her lawyer.
Continues the mother, ‘You are recording without my consent.
‘It’s illegal and I’m going to call my lawyer right now.’
Captioned Stoff in her video post, ‘she went out of her way to come back with her child and yell at us’. Adding, ‘Entitlement these days is real’.
Megan Stoff: ‘People think they can go, hi puppy, hi doggy, and get in their face’.
Speaking to Pittsburgh Action News 4, Stoff said people with service dogs deal with requests from the public to pet the dogs, almost daily.
‘They don’t know they’re not supposed to talk to them and distract them. They think they can go, hi puppy, hi doggy, and get in their face, and that can also distract them even though we’ve trained them to hopefully ignore that.
‘I guess something else I’d want the public to know is that, service dogs are not just for people with physical disabilities or visible disabilities.
‘A lot of people have service dogs for things that are not visible such as seizures, diabetes, PTSD,’ Stoff said.
However, the mother- since nicknamed, ‘Service Dog Sally’ by social media users in yet the latest installment of bad behavior caught on video- offered a different perspective of the events.
In a written statement to the news station, she insists she wasn’t offended by Stoff saying no, she said she decided to confront the group because someone had told her to ‘F**k off’, in front of her two-year-old daughter.
‘My daughter, friend and I were walking behind a group of people with dogs. I asked one woman if my daughter could pet her dog, she’s responded with No in a rude manner.
‘We accepted the answer of NO and was proceeding to Starbucks line for coffee when my friend and I heard a woman from the group tell us to F*** off.
‘My daughter was being held by me when she used profanity.
‘I left Starbucks line to discuss my concerns of her profanity and clarification. After that the woman started recording me as shown.’
The mother has said that since the video went viral, she’s received several hate messages on Facebook.
And then there were these sample reactions that caught this author’s attention- see what you think?
‘When are people going to learn that ‘no’ is a complete sentence.’
‘How does anyone convince themselves they’re right in these stupid situations? How can your head be so far up your own ass, you convince yourself you are entitled to pet any dog you want regardless of what the owner says?’
