INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. (Network Indiana) You do not have to have a special license or a certificate or any kind of proof that you have a service animal, and that has made it easy to take an untrained dog or other kinds of animals into businesses, hospitals, or even the airport.

Indiana may be moving toward coming up with something to make it tougher, and that’s fine with Shannon Walker, with Northwest Battle Buddies.

“It’s such a growing epidemic that something really does have to be done,” she said in an interview from her Washington state office. She said she can speak to Indiana’s problem because she sees it happening everywhere. People, for whatever reason, bring their pets inside, claiming they are service animals.

Walker said she and her trained service animals encountered a woman in a mall with a phony service dog that began trying to attack the trained animals.

“Luckily our dogs didn’t even respond. Our handlers were trained on how to protect the dogs.”

She said the woman’s excuse was that she was on vacation and didn’t want to leave the dog in the car.

“It’s so obvious, you don’t even have to know the laws to know that’s not a service dog,” said Walker. She said the people who train service dogs put many weeks and even months into it. She said her organization, which provides trained animals to former military people who have PTSD, also trains the handlers.

“Those dogs have gone through a minimum of seven months, sometimes up to a year and a half of training. And those handlers, before they get one of our dogs, go through six to eight weeks of training,” she said.

She said when trained animals are there, it will be like they are invisible, they are so well-behaved.

State Sen. Jean Leising (R-Oldenburg) has filed Senate Bill 293 which would require documentation the service animal is in good physical health.

Leising said she filed the bill after getting complaints from public places like churches and hospitals about unruly service animals.