Last week, The Daily Mail ran an astonishing story that a quarter of all divorces now include disputes about pets and that the rise of so-called “pet-nup” agreements now means that judges are dealing with 90 “animal custody” cases every day. It states “Research among family lawyers and a poll of the public said that many couples caught up in divorce are likely to put custody of the pets about their concerns about property, or even the children.”
Rubbish.
I read this article and I laughed and laughed and laughed. I then checked that it wasn’t the first of April. It wasn’t. The Mail was actually serious about this nonsense. This should give us paws for thought.
Firstly, it doesn’t even make sense. Even if it was true, why would the availability of “pet-nup” agreements mean that judges are having to deal with huge numbers of “animal custody” cases every day? It just isn’t pawsible. The whole point of a pre-nup agreement (if such things exist – I have never seen one) is that the pet’s owners agree arrangements for the pet rather than asking a court to decide it.
Secondly, it shows that sometimes, the media is so desperate to fill empty pages that they will print any old nonsense, particularly allows them to come with a funny headline like “Dogs were major bone of contention in a quarter of all divorces in the past year”.
The source of the story is a press release from Direct Line Insurance. I have seen it covered elsewhere, including in The Times, although their version was not quite so over the top. The Mail appears to have felt that the press release was a little ruff around the edges and therefore seems to have added its own questionable maths and come up with the above figures. You would have to be barking mad to believe this was true.
In over 23 years of practising family law, I can count the number of times when pets have been a factor in the case on one hand. I once conducted a collaborative case where the parties spent part of a meeting discussing arrangements for the family dogs. Their dogs’ happiness was important to them and they wanted to make sure that the dogs got to see both owners after the divorce. The collaborative process was a great way to resolve those issues. If the court had been asked to decide how often the pet should spend time with the husband and the wife, I suspect that the district judge would have become somewhat grumpy. He or she would have felt that the issue was trivial and not worthy of valuable court time. I suspect that the couple in the case could probably have resolved that matter directly between them, but they felt that as they were sitting around a table using the collaborative process, they might as well do it that way as well as sorting out the far more complex issues of what to do about their house and pensions and maintenance.
Apart from that, I am struggling to think of any other cases. There been a few others over the years when pets have been brought up in negotiations or discussions, but it is not a major factor in divorces. The only other one I can think of involved a husband arguing that he ought to receive a bigger share of the assets because he had paid her dog’s vet’s bill. He felt that it was the leashed that she could do.
The press tends to lap this nonsense up. There is a large provincial law firm whose press releases have become notorious among lawyers for generating stories in the media about things like how many divorces involve horses or about how many people who have pre-nups, but then don’t get married. I will not name the law firm here because by all accounts they are an excellent team of solicitors. However, the reports usually claim some rather dubious statistics based on what I suspect is no more than a series of anecdotal conversations around the table at a marketing meeting. I think that they need to rein in their marketing department.
17 April 2019