From a policy point of view I'd love to see national certification standards written into the regs. That is incredibly difficult, however, as there are a lot of stakeholders and interested parties. Moreover, the number of trainable tasks is quite high so the standards would be all over the board. Lastly, service animal provisions exist in the ADA, FHA and Air Carrier Access Act so they would have to all be dealt with to create uniformity. This isn't insurmountable but it would probably require legislative changes and multiple agencies to agree on new regs. The fact that it wasn't included in the regs with the original ADA in 1990 or the more recent amendments in 2008 is evidence of just how difficult it would be to get it done. There have been a ton of public and not so public fights regarding this topic every time changes are made to the laws.

My service dog of 8 years retired last January, and we didn't have problems with this until the last two years of his career. Fingers crossed for a good solution. Gonna call out anyone I catch in the meantime.