96 tiMe February 3, 2020
family members than as mere chattel to
be divided by couples, like sofas and TVs.
Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Wash-
ington, D.C., have legislation pending
that would do the same.
“There’s a perception that animal leg-
islation isn’t as important as other legis-
lation,” says Rhode Island state repre-
sentative Charlene Lima, a Democrat,
the sponsor of her state’s bill and the
owner of a 9-year-old Siberian husky.
“I think that’s a complete fallacy.” So do
divorce lawyers, who
say courts are ill pre-
pared to adjudicate
pet-custody battles,
leading to dragged-
out fights. In 2013,
when the New York
County Supreme
Court had to step into
a couple’s quarrel over
a miniature dachs-
hund named Joey, it
acknowledged that
changes in the way
society regards pets
all but guarantee these
cases will increase.
“People who love
their dogs almost
always love them
forever,” Matthew
Cooper, the dog-
owning justice wrote as he considered
Joey’s future. “The same cannot always
be said for those who marry.”
The couple in Joey’s case eventually
reached a custody agreement on their
own, but Cooper, in his ponderings,
cited several other custody feuds
involving dogs, and one cat, that judges
had to settle.
In 1897, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that citizen- owned dogs were personal
property, but animals were far less under-
stood at the time. Dogs in particular were
kept primarily to make money for their
owners through labor or breeding, until
America’s transformation from a mostly
rural society to an urban one. “They
changed from a working animal to our
companions,” says Barbara Gislason, a
Minnesota family lawyer and the author
of Pet Law and Custody.
Nowadays, 80% of owners view their
pets as family members, according to
a survey by the American Veterinary
Medical Association (AVMA). More
dogs and cats are adopted from shel-
ters, friends or relatives, or taken in as
strays, than are purchased from stores
and breeders. Nearly all cat owners and
more than half of dog owners describe
their pets as mixed breeds or mutts.
“All of a sudden, with animals that
have no street value, people are pouring
in thousands of dollars to save them,”
Gislason says. “Now it’s not just aboutinsurance jumped 18% from 2017 to
more than 2 million in 2018. All of this
has fueled a need for veterinarians. The
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts
jobs for vets and vet technicians will grow
by nearly 20% by 2028.
One survey of Hurricane Katrina
survivors found that 44% of those who
refused to evacuate in advance of the
2005 storm that swamped New Orleans
cited pets as the reason. This reluc-
tance to leave a deadly situation spurred
passage in 2006 of a
federal law requiring
state and local offi-
cials to include pets
and service animals
in disaster planning,
from evacuation sce-
narios to shelters. Still,
people don’t want to
be separated from
their animals in times
of crisis. As Hurricane
Harvey floodwaters
poured into his fam-
ily’s Houston home
in 2017, Isiah Court-
ney trudged through
waist-deep water with
his 85-lb. pit bull in
his arms. “I couldn’t
leave him behind,”
Courtney, 30, says of
his dog Bruce, who’s now 4. “I couldn’t
let anything happen to him.”When GIarrusso and Marolla filed
for divorce in 2016 after 23 years of mar-
riage, both knew that a judge was likely
to split up the dogs. That’s because Marox
technically belonged to Giarrusso and
Winnie was Marolla’s, and family judges
generally assign pets to the owner whose
name is on adoption papers or other offi-
cial documents. But the dogs had bonded,
so the couple agreed that Marolla would
keep them and her ex would have visita-
tion rights. They even had a plan in case
one of them moved out of state: Giarrusso
would get the dogs for three months each
summer, for a week at Christmas, in Feb-
ruary and in April.
The system worked until Marolla,
in spring 2017, canceled the visitation
arrangement. In court documents, she
accused Giarrusso of not properly caring
for Marox and Winnie—an allegation he^
Marolla, who shares custody of
dogs Marox and Winnie with her
ex-husband, takes them for a walkSociety
what work the animal is going to do. It’s
about something deeper.”
Estimates of pet ownership today
range from 56.8% to more than 65%
of U.S. households. The higher figure
comes from the American Pet Products
Association trade group and would mark
a record high. Millennials are the major-
ity of pet owners and may be caring for
pets the way they would care for the chil-
dren they’re not having—the 2018 birth
rate was the lowest in 32 years. Of 1,139
millennial pet owners surveyed in 2018
by TD Ameritrade, nearly 70% said they
would take leave from work to care for
a new pet if they could. Nearly 80% of
women and almost 60% of men surveyed
said they considered their pet their “fur
baby.” The number of pets with health