Fighting like cats and dogs

Christine Small with Oskar and picture of Sweetie. Photo / Simon Baker

If Christine Small of Rangiora has a regret, it's that she didn't fight harder for custody of Sweetie, the grey-and-white cat, when her marriage broke up in 2001 and she moved to the South Island.

But her ex-husband was staunch on the subject. "We didn't argue about it or anything," she says. "I just said, 'I'd like Sweetie', but he said, 'She's quite happy where she is, and she's getting a bit old'." Her husband claimed the flight from Gisborne to Christchurch would be too much for the then 7-year-old cat to handle.

In hindsight, Christine views that as a bit of a red herring. Her ex wanted the cat. Divorcing couples in New Zealand are fighting over their pets in increasing numbers.

There were more than 10,000 divorces in NZ last year, and that figure doesn't include separations or break-ups of de-facto relationships. Declining birth rates and growing numbers of childless couples mean pets often effectively become surrogate offspring. So it's no surprise Rover and Ginger are considered fair game by people in a marital dispute.

British research shows that more time is spent fighting over cats and dogs than over the furniture or the stereo.

In fact, in a literal - if not a practical sense - that is how New Zealand law views pets involved in a break-up.

"Pets are defined as a family chattel," says Stephanie Ambler, family law solicitor at Simpson Grierson. Pets are listed in the Property (Relationships) Act along with household furniture, appliances, tools, and vehicles. Such matrimonial property is typically split evenly between the two partners.

Because the Care of Children Act only deals with children, notions such as custody and access technically don't apply to pets. But Ambler believes some factors a court would consider when determining care arrangements for a child could equally be applied to pets. "Where you've got animals involved, it's kind of like children in the fact that it's not the material value that you're after. It's obviously just a strong emotional attachment."

Ambler has worked on cases that include cats, dogs and turtles but says that most couples decide the fate of their pets themselves, either before or after a separation has occurred.

There's increasing evidence that pets are now keeping some ailing relationships together. One 33-year-old Hamilton woman, who asked not to be identified, says she and her husband would have almost certainly split up were it not for the fact neither of them was prepared to give up their much-loved cat. "We'd been going through infertility and infertility treatment, so the cat was really like our baby," she says. Stressed about both work pressures and infertility, this "emotional wreck of a couple" seriously discussed separating and dividing their property in 1999. But the biggest question was: what happens to the cat? "It just made everything too difficult," she says. "Everything else was easy but the cat."