When Maddy, a 39-year-old gallery founder living in Virginia, split from her husband, she imagined their parting would be placid. Aspirational even. Their home would be informally partitioned—she would live in one part, he in another, then there would be a common area in which their two children, along with their Boston terrier and standard poodle, would roam freely. “I thought we were going to have this amazing Scandinavian divorce,” she says.
Yeah, no. That plan hit the skids. Instead, she found a pet-friendly apartment building and assumed the animals would go with her because she says her ex was never crazy about the pets. “But he insisted he have the dogs sometimes too," she says. So, after much negotiation, they came to an off-the-books agreement: The pooches would commute back and forth with the kids. They’ve been doing that weekly shuffle for six years.
Pet sharing after a divorce makes some sense, particularly when you factor in the degree to which Americans are majorly, totally, butt-crazy in love with their domestic creatures. The average dog owner spends more than $1,000 a year on Fido, and those with more disposable income drop their animals off at day care, buy them BarkBoxes and health insurance, and snap little raincoats on them when it drizzles. According to a recent report, in 2018, pet spending in the U.S. hit a record $86.7 billion, nearly double what it was just 10 years ago.
Blame the boom on—who else?—millennials, who have fewer children than previous generations and own more animals. In fact, a full 75 percent of Americans in their thirties have dogs and 51 percent have cats, according to a 2016 report. To a generation that’s saddled with student loan debt and concerned about overpopulation, climate change, and the chemicals in American cheese, pets could represent a comforting, safe investment. But what happens when the pet is part and parcel of a household that finds itself upended by separation? A legitimate custody arrangement, in many cases.
For decades, house pets—formally known as companion animals—have largely been treated as property in divorce cases. If you bought the pet or paid the lion's share of its bills, it was yours. But that’s beginning to change.
Back in 1995, there was a precedent established in Bennett vs. Bennett, a Florida case in which the judge ruled that animals were personal property—much like, say, the Vitamix or the Dyson—and courts therefore didn’t have the authority to grant custody or visitation schedules. But, since 2017, Illinois, Alaska, and, just last month, California have passed bills that change that tune completely, and have empowered judges to consider the well-being of the animal instead of the desires of the human owners—and to assign a joint custody schedule that’s in the critter’s best interest.
The idea is that, like children, pets are sentient. They’re able to perceive and feel things, unlike pieces of furniture, an SUV, or the wedding china to be divided between exes. Judges are increasingly being given the discretion to determine whether your pet spends weekends with you or Christmas with the ex or any other number of configurations that might keep a couple passing a pet back and forth for the rest of its life.
“There’s an overall trend in the law to recognize that animals do have interests that are independent of their guardians or what they’re producing,” says Cristina Stella, a staff attorney at the Animal Legal Defense Fund.
When you talk pet custody, someone’s bound to advise you to save yourself the headache and keep it out of court, or, if you can’t sort it independently, go the mediation route, which means using a neutral third party to help the soon-to-be divorced couple negotiate who gets what in a less contentious environment. “The beauty of mediation is that everything that’s said is confidential and cannot be used against any party,” says Debra Vey Voda-Hamilton, the founder of Hamilton Law and Mediation, a gold-standard practice for pet disputes. “So you’re safe to be really honest.” Mediated divorces also tend to be quicker and cheaper than litigated ones.
Voda-Hamilton says the average couple requires six to eight hours’ worth of mediation to come to an agreement. What could you possibly talk about for that length of time? Well, negotiating vet bills seems simple. If you share a dog 50-50, you split its bills down the middle, right? But if the dog eats a plate of brownies that you left out and needs to get its stomach pumped, for instance, should your ex have to split that bill? Or you travel out of town for work last-minute when the cat is scheduled to be at your house, are you obliged to coordinate care with your ex or can you ask a friend to watch it instead? The idea behind mediation is to plan for and head off disagreements before they happen.
“There are entire cottage industries that have sprung up to support the sharing of animals,” Voda-Hamilton says.
To avoid the whole meshugaas, if you’re a major pet lover with marriage in sight and the unknown on your mind, you might scrimp on a few wedding details and put that cash toward securing a prenup that covers any shared pets or, as those in the know call it, a "petnup." (You shouldn’t need one if you purchased your pet before entering the relationship, as it’ll likely be considered separate, rather than community, property, but it’s worth consulting with a family lawyer in your state.)
Prenuptial agreements aren’t just for the world’s Bogey Lowensteins, those guys with country houses and gold bars falling out of their pockets. “We talked about getting a prenup before we even got engaged,” Erin Lowry, a finance expert and author of Broke Millennial, says. “It’s not romantic, but at the end of the day, a marriage is a merger of my assets and your assets. And I’d never enter any other contractual obligation without protecting myself.”
Lowry and her now husband considered putting custody of their dog, Mosby, into their prenup, but decided not to, as they’d adopted him as a senior and he was sick. “Had we had a young dog, I might have put in that I’d get him, because while my husband loved him dearly, financially and emotionally, Mosby and I were very ride-or-die,” she says. But on the other hand, it’s hard to make decisions about hypothetical situations and hypothetical pets; were they to divorce in 10 years and she found herself traveling all the time for work, for instance, it could make more sense for her husband to keep their dog. “You can always amend your prenup as things change,” Lowry says.
After divorce rates peaked during the 1970s and 1980s, much has been made of the fact that they are now on the decline, especially among millennials. Still, if you’re thinking about splitting with your spouse, or you’ve already been through a divorce, sunny statistics aren’t exactly useful. Throughout this weeklong series, Glamour.com explores what it means to uncouple in a modern world.