Animal Law is Emerging as Specialty Across Nation
posted on 8/5/2004 11:03:41 AM

Michael Kiefer
The Arizona Republic
Aug. 4, 2004 12:00 AM


Animals in the news: a dog dragged behind a pickup truck in west Phoenix and a malnourished horse in south Phoenix. If their owners are indicted on animal-cruelty charges, they will face a county prosecutor experienced in animal cases, and potentially could find attorneys skilled at defending against those kinds of charges.

Animal law is emerging as a specialty across the country.

"It's not just companion animals. It's livestock, it's wildlife, it's animals used in entertainment," said Stephanie Nichols-Young, a Phoenix attorney who spends most of her workweek representing corporations, and the rest of it representing animal advocacy groups.

And although attorneys are not giving up lucrative careers in real estate or corporate law to represent animal rights, they are increasingly finding that cases with animals are loaded with ethical and emotional traps, whether it's a case of dog bites man, a couple suing each other for custody of their beloved pet, or a neighbor suing the lady next door who has 50 cats.

Law schools now offer courses in animal law. And the State Bar of Arizona, which is both a professional society and a regulating agency, has created an animal law "section" with 105 attorneys who meet to discuss legal topics regarding animals.

"Eighty to 90 percent of animal law is just property law," said Chris Wencker, an attorney in Tucson who has represented clients on both sides of cruelty cases.

Except for a few major differences.

"An animal isn't like any other kind of property," Wencker said. "It goes out on its own."

And you have to take care of it, although not to the extent of caring for a child. You can lock your dog in the house alone for the day.

"There's no duty to take care of any kind of chattel property under the law," Wencker said. "You can destroy your own property whenever you want. You can break your chair, burn your couch as long as you're not endangering anyone's life or violating a fire code. But there are criminal statutes that say you can't do that to your dog."

Prosecutors sort the felonies from the misdemeanors and determine whether they are cases of cruelty or of extreme neglect.

"One of the things that's different about a cruelty case rather than a property kind of case like a burglary is that you do have levels of proof where you have to show the injury to the animal and whether or not the animal suffered," said Amy Curtis, a deputy Maricopa County attorney who prosecutes cruelty cases.

But those aren't the only animal laws on the books.

The Arizona Revised Statutes include laws about protecting game animals and other wildlife, raising livestock and chickens, and how to kill them all. There are laws about feeding garbage to pigs and what happens if you poison a bad dog. There are laws forbidding dogfights and cockfights, laws governing racing horses and greyhounds and laws that forbid interfering with seeing-eye dogs.

There are federal laws protecting threatened and endangered species, laws that also are used to shut down logging and ranching and to protect habitat.

Then there are municipal ordinances telling you how many dogs or cats you can keep on your property, whether you can stable horses and what happens if your dog runs free and poops on your neighbor's lawn.

Where there are laws, there are lawyers. And for every attorney fighting to set free the lab rats, there is another one lobbying on behalf of animal research. For every one suing over a dog bite, there's another representing the dog owner.

Nichols-Young tends to represents animal advocacy groups. She helped write the 1998 voters' initiative that made cockfighting illegal in Arizona. She represented a Flagstaff group that wanted to keep feral cats from being killed by government trappers fighting a 2001 rabies outbreak. She does defamation review for a publication about the rights of racing greyhound dogs, which are sometimes illegally sold to animal-testing labs.

"Racing greyhounds are a huge issue here," she said. "Animals used in research are an issue. There's always been animals worth lots of money like thoroughbred horses, so there have always been attorneys working on those issues."

But the newest frontier in animal law relates to companion animals. In other states, attorneys fight over custody of Fido after the divorce. Nichols-Young said that animals increasingly figure into estate planning as well, specifying what happens to Trixie and Fluffy if their owners die first.

Wencker recently represented a client whose dog had been shot by a neighbor. Although the dog did not die, it had to have a leg amputated because of the wound. The client sued, but when it came time to determine damages, Wencker wanted more for his client than the price of a dog and its medical bills. He considered "loss of companionship," and the trauma of the event to the owner.

"The average person who has a family pet that's been around for five years that suddenly dies because your neighbor shot him, you feel grief not only for the loss of the pet but also for what your neighbor did," he said.

Wencker got $3,000 for his client.


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