Exes play tug-of-war for pets

By Rachel Aviv
Special to The Seattle Times

ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES Smokey, Dave Rose's "full-time" dog, right, comes over to check out what's happening between Rose and HeyZeus, the 7-year-old husky who is with Rose every other weekend. The shared-custody arrangement is the result of a settlement between Rose, a Seattle fish culturist, and his ex-girlfriend.

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One morning last February, Dave Rose, a Seattle fish culturist, met his ex-girlfriend, Lori Hughes, and her attorney in a quiet, no-leash area of Magnuson Park. The meeting site was carefully chosen to eliminate gawkers and undesired confusion.

"We didn't want the leashes to get in the way of anything," Rose recalled.

It was, for Rose, "the day the eagle would finally land." More specifically, it was the day he would assume partial custody of his and Hughes' 7-year-old Husky, HeyZeus.

While shared custody of children is a situation familiar to thousands of divorced parents, it's also becoming far more common to pet owners who split up. And in Seattle, where more households contain pets than have children, many animal advocates and legal experts are watching the growing movement to grant more "rights" to animals.

Rose, 43, filed suit in King County Superior Court 14 months earlier after he and Hughes broke up and, he said, Hughes tried to keep HeyZeus for herself. It was a shock, he said, since he and Hughes had adopted the dog as a 4-month-old puppy in Alaska before moving to Seattle.

"My options were to either chalk it up to life experience ... just kind of drop it and go on with my life," he said. "Or I could do what most of my friends said, and [try to] get him back. That means either breaking into her house or her car and taking him back, or accosting her at a dog park or some public place and just grabbing his leash."

Rose ultimately rejected those options and hired a lawyer, all the while viewing the process from two perspectives — "one being me, upset about the whole thing. The other shaking my head, in disbelief at the silliness that I was actually suing someone for this."

He says he spent around $4,000 on the suit, which was settled out of court with the assistance of a mediator.

Hughes declined to comment for this story.

More than just property
 
Rose's ambivalence — admitting to, yet being embarrassed by, his emotional connection to an animal — is reflected, more or less, in the way the legal system traditionally has handled such cases.

The majority of courts still refuse to entertain pet-custody disputes. In 2002, a Pennsylvania Superior Court judge concluded that seeking shared custody of the dog in question, a mixed golden retriever/Labrador, would be "seeking an arrangement analogous, in law, to a visitation schedule for a table or a lamp."

But in a handful of cases across the country, courts have begun to consider a pet as more than just property — as something more akin to a child.

In 2000, a San Diego couple spent up to $150,000 in disputes over their pointer-greyhound mix, Gigi. Aiding the judge's decision were an animal behaviorist and a "Day in the Life of Gigi" videotape (Gigi seen under the couch, around her bowl, romping through water) designed to determine with whom — the "mother" or the "father" — the dog's lifestyle would correspond best.

The custody cases, which animal scholars call a sign of the "growing crack" in the legal classification of companion animals as property, have no doubt benefited from a boom in the subspecialty of animal law.

"Animal law" was not even a term 10 years ago. Now 16 bar associations, including Washington's, have chapters dealing exclusively with animal law; and 35 universities, including Harvard, Yale and the University of Washington, offer courses in animal law, with the majority of the courses including segments on pet custody.

Many of those campaigning for the rights of animals explain their campaign to others as a civil-rights movement on par with any other.

To jumpstart a change in the property classification, the state of Rhode Island and 13 cities, including San Francisco — although not Seattle — have officially changed the word animal "owner" to animal "guardian."

The idea, entirely rhetorical, is to elevate the status of the animal in the community: The caretaker does not own the animal as a piece of property, but guards and cares for it as he or she would a child.

Meanwhile, couples are waiting longer to have children, and a pet is treated more like a member of the family. More than half the married women in a recent study cited by Jon Katz in his book "The New Work of Dogs" told researchers that they got more emotional support from their dogs than from their husbands.

In the last three years, the Animal Legal Defense Fund has filed more than 30 friend-of-the-court briefs with courts faced with animal-custody decisions, including several filed in the Puget Sound area.

The briefs implore judges to determine custody disputes according to the "needs and interests" of the animal — that "feeling individual who has lived, prospered, loved and been loved."

Although such a brief was not filed in Rose and Hughes' case, its principles were applied — meaning that when the couple reached their final settlement, it required the dog's consent, so to speak.

In the year he lived alone without HeyZeus, Rose had become lonely and adopted another husky — Smokey, his "stepchild" — from the humane society. Hughes wanted proof, before she agreed to the custody settlement, that HeyZeus approved of the new dog.

Luckily, HeyZeus and Smokey hit it off.

"It's kind of neat for Smokey to go off with HeyZeus and be dogs together," Rose says. "And I think HeyZeus kind of likes the buddy — he's more the alpha dog. Having Smokey along makes it more enjoyable for him, 'cause I'm not that into jumping over logs and chasing squirrels."

"More vigorously fought"

Rose's lawyer, Bellingham-based Adam Karp, said he had been surprised by some of the issues Hughes raised, but in general, he said, a little griping was to be expected.

"Custody disputes over companion animals are more vigorously fought — with a bit more dirt on both sides — than custody disputes involving human children," he said.

He says that may be because parents naturally expect to share custody of children, while pet owners may be surprised that an ex-spouse feels a right to "co-parent" a dog or cat.

Karp is one of the few lawyers in the country who specialize exclusively in animal law. In his four years of practice, he says he's seen a marked increase in the number of animal-custody cases.

He has received between 30 and 40 calls regarding animal-custody disputes and currently is working on five cases — one in Skagit County and four in Whatcom County.

Rose and Hughes' setup is not unlike a lot of child-custody situations. "Lori has HeyZeus in Woodinville at all times except every other weekend," Rose says. "We meet in a parking lot roughly halfway between our homes at 7 p.m. on Thursday for my pickup, and Sunday evening at 7 for the drop-off. If Monday is an official holiday, I get to keep HeyZeus until Monday at 7 p.m.

"There haven't been any adjustment issues. HeyZeus always acts happy to see me."

Rachel Aviv is a Brooklyn, N.Y.,-based writer: rachel.aviv@gmail.com