Ok then, fair enough, and anyway I am certainly in the ‘raised eyebrow camp’ myself.
The matter of the bloody horse, in isolation, has rather left behind the office’s considerable problems with her questionable adoption of a babyish voice, and the woman’s persistent bothering of colleagues, seeking reassurance.
Those elements, were the toy not mentioned, would be enough to make me determined that HR act urgently to remove that pressure from the office by whatever means available, consistent with a compassionate implementation of policy.
Staff cannot perform when constant support for one colleague’s performance is demanded like this: nobody’s been spoken to (or trained in MH support) by management, and as time goes on it’ll develop into strong resistance.
Add the damn toy into all this, and I’d be at HR demanding direction and assurance that they will take on the burden of the colleague’s present disorder to assess its cause, and organise whatever needs doing to help her, whether it be time off on account of a temporary stress catastrophe, or adjustments at work or WFH should it all be a manifestation of ND they'd not been aware of.
What can’t continue is allowing increasingly demanding behaviour to be absorbed by her colleagues, as though it were up to them to weigh up her capability and needs themselves.
She’s knocking 30, after all. I suppose there may be a general expectation that any ND difficulties would have been mentioned.
Until all of this is examined and explained, I think the issue of carting her horse around at work turns into a fruitless argument really, because there’s a bloody great chasm in reasonable interpretations of it, between performative and manipulative idiosyncrasy (eminently possible, after all) and a genuine aspect of a neurological disorder.
The first is not acceptable imo, and the second is not a great deal more so until/unless staff are treated with respect by management and given an explanation and the necessary guidelines and modus operandi.
Until there’s a medical explanation for the horse being brought to staff meetings, (for example) causing interruptions in the concentration of colleagues, and centring attention on one apparently semi-detached person, then all the charitable instincts that may exist there cannot make the toy an acceptable adjunct to office work, and I think this individual has no greater rights than the rest.
It’s inappropriate professional behaviour, albeit not particularly heinous (she’s not getting blotto under a desk, after all).
(It’s strange that this seems not to have occurred to her though. There’s a fiancé somewhere whom you’d expect to urge her to look after her own interests at work)
PS after writing a novel here I suppose my brief answer to your point is: that horse as constant companion is unacceptable in an office, because it is so attention seeking and distracting IF its owner isn’t ND.
But until that is thrashed out it’s making any discussion unnecessarily combative (including all my own comments, from the start) because it is confusing disparate arguments, seemingly (though not actually) at the expense of a compassionate attitude to ND needs.