Look, after watching my ex-wife wear a black armband for an entire year after our dog Bart died, I truly understand how attached people are to their pets.
But there are limits.
Aren’t there?
OK, perhaps not based on what I’ve witnessed in the past year in Greater Victoria. Such as the people who went berserk after Saanich wanted to impose stricter leash rules in public parks. I get that people disagreed, but the amount of paranoid emails I received from Saanich dog owners was insane.
These weren’t just any protest letters – some were 10,000-word screeds accusing Saanich politicians of all sorts of skulduggery and filled with assertions that their dogs would literally want to die if put on a leash.
But as far as pet-related paranoia goes, nothing topped the wild court cases involving people fighting over their pets after breaking up.
The B.C. Civil Resolution Tribunal was filled with these cases, including one involving a cat in Victoria. The couple had purchased the cat during their relationship but after things went sour, they agreed to share custody of the cat. The cat went back and forth between the two until one day the woman decided she was going to keep the cat and didn’t return it.
So the guy went to the tribunal, which ruled that the cat was his property because he had paid for it. The woman was ordered to return the cat – this is where things got even crazier. After my story ran, I was contacted by the sister of the man who won custody of the cat.
She emailed me and said that she was the go-between for the return of the cat. She wrote that the ex had sent photos of the cat in question, but that the photos were clearly of a similar but different cat.
In fact, the cat was an “imposter” that only looked like the cat the two had fought over.
The sister was worried the imposter would be handed over and not the real cat.
I never did hear back about what actually happened but you just can’t make this stuff up.
Then there was the case of a grieving daughter who was forced to go to the B.C. Civil Resolution Tribunal in order to force the return of her deceased father’s dog, named Cookie.
Brandy Parlett proved that she was managing the estate of her father, John Michael Parlett.
“Ms. Parlett says that the respondent, Trisha Gatfield, offered to care for her father’s dog, Cookie, while her father was undergoing chemotherapy,” read the CRT decision. “Ms. Parlett says her father died and Ms. Gatfield refuses to return Cookie to her family. Ms. Parlett asks for an order that Cookie be returned to her and that Ms. Gatfield pay her expenses to retrieve Cookie.”
Gatfield responded that Cookie was given to her by other members of John Parlett’s family.
For the CRT, the issue was that Cookie is property of the estate of John Parlett and whoever is the administrator of the estate is the one who decides who should have Cookie.
The CRT agreed that Brandy is the administrator and so it ordered that Cookie be returned by Gatfield, but it did not award costs to reimburse the family.
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