The Hindu : Front Page : Post-divorce everything has been split, but what about the dog?

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Post-divorce everything has been split, but what about the dog?

Judith Summers

‘I knew in my heart that she’d be able to take better care of him’
People will go to extraordinary lengths to keep their pets during a divorce

When my friends Mike and Pamela decided to get divorced a few years ago, things couldn’t have been more civilised at first. They had no problem deciding who should get the car, the television or the cappuccino machine, and they agreed to split the value of their home 50:50. Then it came to deciding who should have Trusty, their pet springer spaniel, and all hell broke loose. “As far as I was concerned, Trusty was my dog,” Michael says. “And, however impractical, I wanted to keep him. The trouble was that Pam felt exactly the same. We were like two mutts fighting over a bone.”

Dogs are treated by the law as property. But that is not how many owners think of them. “They’re actually living family members who bring out parental instincts in their owners,” says Jennifer Keene, an American dog trainer. Keene faced her own who-gets-Fluffy? problem when she and her husband split up several years ago — an event that spurred her into writing a self-help manual about the subject, We Can’t Stay Together for the Dogs: Doing What’s Best for Your Dog When Your Relationship Breaks Up. “Telling a dog owner that they’re not going to see their dog again is like saying to a mother or a father that they won’t see their child.”

Add the upset of losing a beloved dog or cat to the trauma of losing a home, a partner, a way of life and perhaps even the residence of one’s children as well.

Take one each

Keene and her husband had two dogs, Sixxy, a pointer cross, and Moxxy, a rescued Australian cattle dog, and they quickly managed to reach an amicable agreement over them. “Since they weren’t getting on well with each other either, we decided to split them up and take one each.”

Keene took Moxxy, “a real mommy’s dog,” anyway, while her husband got Sixxy. Though both parties retained visiting rights over the other’s dog, keeping up a relationship as a long-distance “part-time pet-parent,” as Keene calls it, proved extremely difficult in practice and she eventually gave up trying to see Sixxy.

It seems that people will go to extraordinary lengths to keep their precious pets during a divorce, particularly in the U.S. Eight years ago, Dr. Stanley Perkins and his wife, Linda, a professional couple from San Diego, were reputed to have spent up to $1,50,000 in a two-year battle over who should get custody of Gigi, the pointer-greyhound cross-breed they had got from an animal shelter two years before.

Their dispute culminated in a three-day hearing in the divorce courts, with half the time said to have been devoted to Gigi’s future.

Reports by animal behaviourists, bonding studies and a Day in the Life of Gigi video were all presented to the judge, who ended up awarding custody to Linda, who had insisted during the hearing that she was Gigi’s “mommy.”

More recently, Marsh Newmark, a New York businessman, was quoted by the New York Daily News as having spent $60,000 trying to get his labrador, Rocky, from his estranged wife, the soprano Darynn Zimmer, in a dispute that involved dog-napping and even accusations of dog abuse. As custody battles over pets have become more common, so animal law, once a niche area, has moved into the mainstream.

More law schools

Ten years ago, there were less than a dozen law schools in the U.S. offering courses in the subject. There are now more than 90, including Yale and Harvard, and seven Canadian universities have followed suit. Meanwhile, lawyers in Sydney, Australia, have taken to drawing up “petimony” agreements for divorcing pet-owners, covering custody issues, visitation rights and even financial support to keep Fluffy or Fifi in the style to which he or she has become accustomed.

If pets can inherit money — the billionaire Leona Helmsley’s pampered Maltese terrier, Trouble, received $12m in trust when she died in 2007 — and a dog, Scooby, could appear as a witness in a Parisian murder trial earlier this year, it surely follows that pets will soon be entitled to their own day in the divorce courts, and perhaps even legal representation.

But how does a judge, more used to the serious business of deciding children’s futures, deal with the relatively trivial issue of who should get the family pet? Pet custody battles rarely reach court in Britain, according to Trevor Cooper, an expert in dog law, and when they do, judges are unlikely to look kindly on them. In British — as in American — law a pet is officially a chattel, no more and no less than the cutlery you were given as a wedding present. Courts can ask the welfare question — what is in the pet’s best interest? — but are not bound by it.

Calling contest

Should a dog’s wishes, as well as its welfare, be taken into consideration? And how can a judge tell what those wishes might be? One way is the so-called “calling contest,” when a pet is placed in the middle of a courtroom, halfway between the warring parties, and both are asked to call it over at the same time. Whoever the dog runs to wins custody. This hit-and-miss solution appeared back in 1937 in the film The Awful Truth, a screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne as Gerry and Lucy Warriner, a wealthy couple squabbling in the divorce court over custody of their fox terrier, Mr. Smith. Lucy Warriner wins the calling contest, but only by hiding Mr. Smith’s favourite toy inside her mink muff and secretly producing it at the last minute.

In the end, my friends resolved their battle for custody of Trusty without resort to the courts. Michael gave in and let Pam have him.

“I realised that I was just being stubborn and using Trusty as a way of getting at Pam,” he says. “I knew in my heart that she’d be able to take better care of him.” — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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