Video - Family Law - Family Pet

Our family law team is experience in a wide range of services including helping in marriage contracts, cohabitation contracts, separation agreements, divorce proceedings and custody disputes.

When speaking about custody disputes sometimes it has nothing to do with children. When a relationship breaks down couples go through an emotional roller coaster and sometimes can’t come to a decision on the family pet.

In this case Associate Kristin Greenough explains what can happen in this scenario.

Transcript:

Hi, I’ve been asked to talk about family pets in the context of a relationship break down.

What I can tell you is unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective, family pets are treated as property so it's far better if you can work that out between yourselves. If you're working between your former partner you can get quite creative. You could have a shared pet parenting relationship but if you were to be subject to the law on this and ended up in the court system then the judge would be treating it just as another other property typically and we be looking at factors such as who owned that pet initially or who would be best able to care for it. Judges typically don't care for dealing with the family pet, there been some humorous decisions in the past which they have expressed their displeasure. That is how we deal with pets. For more information about your family pet and any other family law issues then please give us a call at FH&P Lawyers.