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While Emotional Support Animals or Comfort Animals are often used as part of a medical treatment plan as therapy animals, they are not considered service animals under the ADA. These support animals provide companionship, relieve loneliness, and sometimes help with depression, anxiety, and certain phobias, but do not have special training to perform tasks that assist people with disabilities. Even though some states have laws defining therapy animals, these animals are not limited to working with people with disabilities and therefore are not covered by federal laws protecting the use of service animals. Therapy animals provide people with therapeutic contact, usually in a clinical setting, to improve their physical, social, emotional, and/or cognitive functioning.

Boylan registered Brutis under the website RegisterMyServiceAnimal.com

First of registering his squirrel at RMSA is silly for two reasons, 1. the squirrel by no means meets the ADA definition of a Service Animal and 2. RMSA is not a valid recognized organization.

This gentleman has several problems of his own making contributing to the issue. Also I have not been able to find Florida's list of acceptable ESA's which may work against him because Florida is a state that tends to side with landlords on this subject.

A squirrel wouldn't be under ADA accommodations, it would be under HUD’s extremely broad emotional support animal reasonable accommodation for any residence covered by the FAIR housing act (which would be virtually all of them.)

This case ended as soon as he handed over his doctor's note. When he did that, it became a reasonable accommodation request which must be granted short of actual damage being done by the animal AND no reasonable steps taken to prevent future damage.

And yeah, HUD does not (nor probably ever will) require any ‘registration’ of an ESA.

As for the exotic designation, Florida's helpfully answered that: http://myfwc.com/license/captive-wildlife/#not required — Squirrels are not considered exotic animals and require no special permit.

So, yeah, hope the association likes paying the guy's legal bills and hopefully it's amicable enough that he doesn't sue them for damages, as they've already lost.