The Counselor’s Corner:

Do you know that one of the most significant trends in divorce in recent years involves the question of who is going to get custody of the family pets? There are even experts who help determine who should get custody. This is an extension of the concept of a pet psychologist. (No, while I have been seeing humans as patients for the last 10 years, I have yet to see my first cocker spaniel.)

It seems that pet custody disputes have yielded expert witnesses such as Dr. Amy Marder, a veterinarian in Lexington, Mass.

Marder is often hired to handle cases in the greater Massachusetts area that deal with both spouses wanting the pet as part of the divorce settlement. Marder has an approach, a technique she uses in evaluating with whom she believes the pet should reside. Marder spends a couple of hours with the pet interacting with each potential owner. She then asks each spouse a group of questions designed to elicit who plays with the pet more, who tends to feed it, who takes it outside for exercise, which of the two spends more time with the pet, etc.

Rarely will a divorce involving pets take place without an attorney suggesting a “calling contest.” These are somewhat idiotic methods used by attorneys in the past in which each owner stands at the opposite end of a room and the pet is put in the middle of the room. Each owner then calls, pleads and cajoles the pet in an attempt to get the pet to come to him or her. I would think the pet would need the help of a pet psychiatrist after enduring one of these calling exercises.

I imagine the losing spouse then requests they go two out of three in the calling contest!

Well fortunately, Marder has her own technique that does not include the outdated calling contest.

What does she base her decision on and her recommendation to the court? Marder looks for things like the body language of the pet as it interacts with each owner, which includes whether the pet sits closer to one owner than the other when spending time with each owner, not to mention how the pet reacts when each owner pets it. Marder then takes her information and makes a recommendation based on who she thinks the pet has a stronger bond with, along with who she thinks would be the better caretaker for the pet.

Do you know that of the approximately 200 accredited law schools in this country, about half of them offer animal law courses? When I was in law school in 1977 through l980, I can safely say that animal law was not on the agenda.