Adam Leitner Bailey’s response was as brilliant as it was ridiculous: It’s racism. That was the retort to demands that his client be held accountable for a vicious attack.

Pit bull Luna went berserk in front of the Chelsea Modern on W. 18th St. near 10th Ave. and “viciously attacked and mauled” Kinje, a Havanese mix that looks like a tiny shih tzu, around 12:15 p.m. on May 31, according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Manhattan Supreme Court. Both dogs live in the building with their owners.

“There was a tremendous amount of blood,” according to Jo Lynn Sorenson, Kinje’s walker, who filed an affidavit that’s part of the lawsuit.

For the unwary, a “walker” is a New York City occupation that exists to compensate for the hubris of keeping animals in apartments and pretending to care for them when you have more important things to do. But this wasn’t just a pet. Of course not. Pets are subject to limitations, including their ability to attack other animals.

Bailey also insists Luna is a therapy dog who has helped Gregory Carteron since he had a serious bike accident.

And Bailey can prove it with the certificate downloaded from the therapist of the future online. But then, Luna’s victim is no mere lapdog either.

Kinje, who volunteers with the Good Dog Foundation, a charity that brings pet therapy to area kids’ hospitals, “suffered multiple bite wounds around her head and between her eyes,” Sorenson claimed in her affidavit.

Kinje is the Forence Nightingale of puppies. That’s why Bailey had to climb the next rung of the social justice ladder to save his pooch.

Luna is a four-breed pit bull mix rather than a full-fledged pit bull, according to Bailey. He insisted Luna’s troubles stem from one condo board member who’s a “racist against pit bulls.”

“It’s dog racism,” Bailey said. “What is it – like you don’t like someone because of the (color of the dog’s) skin?”

Ridiculous? What if a nice and relatively harmless notion from a few decades earlier, that pets could help comfort the lonely elderly or terminal, has scampered up the slippery slope of Manhattan condos and down the aisles of Boeing airplanes, and it’s all a half-baked scam?

A therapy-animal trend grips the United States. The San Francisco airport now deploys a pig to calm frazzled travelers. Universities nationwide bring dogs (and a donkey) onto campus to soothe students during finals. Llamas comfort hospital patients, pooches provide succor at disaster sites and horses are used to treat sex addiction.

And that duck on a plane? It might be an emotional-support animal prescribed by a mental health professional.

You can’t touch these animals without risking viral attacks at your meanness and international online censure. Don’t want to sit next to a snake on a plane? Tough noogies, graybeard, Emotional support is every fragile teacups flavor of justice, and how dare you question your devolving world to suit the most emotionally needy person? Of course, they could be totally lying about it, and just want an excuse to carry their pet on a plane, but if they say they’re frightened, you can’t challenge their lived experience. How dare you marginalize snake lady?

Earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Developmental Science, an introduction to a series of articles on “animal-assisted intervention” said research into its efficacy “remains in its infancy.” A recent literature review by Molly Crossman, a Yale University doctoral candidate who recently wrapped up one study involving an 8-year-old dog named Pardner, cited a “murky body of evidence” that sometimes has shown positive short-term effects, often found no effect and occasionally identified higher rates of distress.

“It’s a field that has been sort of carried forward by the convictions of practitioners” who have seen patients’ mental health improve after working with or adopting animals, said James Serpell, director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. “That kind of thing has almost driven the field, and the research is playing catch-up. In other words, people are recognizing that anecdote isn’t enough.”

On the one hand, empiricism has been embraced to rid society of its age-old common sense biases. On the other, it’s not really empiricism when it’s a collection of self-serving anecdotes or when studies that challenge the new feelz are rejected as hateful. It boils down to the question of your right not to eat dinner next to a ferret and the guy whose ichthyophobia would preclude his dining pleasure without his ferret by his side,

The argument isn’t that emotional-support pets don’t serve any purpose, but that they may not serve all the purposes claimed. The argument isn’t that anyone who claims a pet serves a therapeutic purpose, but that some people are lying through their teeth about it, while others grossly exaggerate their emotional needs. The argument is that we’ve constructed an unchallengable wall of feelz, based on the premise that we err on the side of believing any claim of suffering rather than question whether the ferret-loving diner will suffer severe emotional distress from his baked talapia.

“Here’s a reason to get a puppy,” NBC announced. “Kids with pets have less anxiety.”

It was a classic case of conflating correlation and causation, which Herzog says is common. Cherry-picked positive results also are a problem, as he says happens in promotional materials from the Human-Animal Bond Research Initiative (HABRI). The pet-industry backed organization funds research on the topic.

“The number of papers I see that start out, ‘It is now well-established that there are health benefits from owning pets’ – that drives me crazy,” [Western Carolina University psychologist Hal] Herzog said. “Yes, there’s literature that supports that. But there’s also literature that doesn’t find that.”

Life has stress. Kids have anxiety. Rather than teach them, let them get over it so they can mature to be capable of dealing with it, it’s so much easier to hand them a pet and pretend it solves everything.

But what then when this pet-fix ends up with Luna, the therapy dog, mauling Kinje, the savior of children? The obvious answer is fur color. Racism is even more horrifying than denying the perpetually needy their emotional fix, and who would be so cruel as to “lynch” a dog for being black?

Or maybe it’s all total malarkey and the lady holding her comfort pig is just full of shit, not that it matters since there’s nothing anyone can do about it anyway. Sad tears and a claim of victimhood is all it takes to overcome any question if one is sufficiently empathetic. And anyone who isn’t is just a racist anyway, so they don’t get a say.