Editorial
Front Page - Friday, April 2, 2010
How lawbreaking led to sleepless night
Mark Levison
It all started when my wife Cheryl’s dog, Casey, died. Well, she wasn’t exactly my wife at the time, but I suppose that fact would be successfully objected to as irrelevant, so “let’s move on,” as the judges on Law & Order always say. Cheryl doesn’t seem happy unless she’s taking care of lots of mammals. So after Casey took “The Last Train to Clarksville,” Cheryl announced, “I think we need to get a Great Dane.” Maybe I’m not the caretaker type – maybe I’m the tough guy trial lawyer type who would rather be gruff than soft, but I wasn’t enthused.
A few weeks passed and I heard nothing. As it turned out, during that time, Cheryl was trying to adopt a Great Dane from the Humane Society, but they kept turning her down because they thought she had too many dogs.
I forgot to mention, she already had a Pug named “Meaty,” who had been returned to the Humane Society by two prior dissatisfied owners, a miniature, totally self-absorbed, yapping Schnauzer named “Little Dog” and a Pit Bull that didn’t even deserve a name. The Pit and Schnauzer just showed up on our doorstep and got “adopted”. (I think the word is out on the street.)
Then one Friday she put her arm around me and said, “Honey, why don’t we take a nice ride into the country tomorrow and have a little picnic. Cheryl’s not really the country type, so rather than taking the bait, I just said, “Sure.” After a long silence, she gave me a big smile and said, “I found this Great Dane that was used for breeding. It has lived outside all of its life, and because it has had its last litter, the breeders want to give it away. It has had a terrible life and we could make its last year or two better.” Appealing to my lawyer logic, she added, “That way we could see if we can handle a Great Dane.”
Because I had been told it’s always best to say yes to the woman you’re involved with, I smiled and agreed, even though I was not truly enthusiastic about adding a miniature pony to my wife’s burgeoning collection. I did, however, question the cost of feeding a Great Dane. Cheryl explained to me that she knew how to buy cheap food, in bulk, and it really would cost “almost nothing.”
As it turned out, this dog wasn’t just “in the country,” its domicile was a five-hour drive. About three and a half hours into the excursion, Cheryl received a call. Her demeanor blackened and she turned very angry. Eventually she hung up, turned to me and said, “They killed my dog.” I asked what that meant. She explained the dog had just been run over. I said, “Honey, be calm. It wasn’t your dog; you’ve never seen that dog.” She gritted her teeth and yelled, “First the Humane Society wouldn’t give me one of their reject dogs, and now this guy kills my dog.” It went on like that for a while. (In keeping with proper spousal etiquette, I agreed, it was her dog.)
She then explained the breeders had an even older female Dane they would be “willing” to give to us, but she didn’t know if she wanted to deal with “dog killers.” I suggested that because we already had traveled about four hours, we might as well drive the rest of the way and at least look.
The breeder’s house was in the middle of farm land. It was hard to imagine any dog being hit by a car anywhere within 30 miles. Maybe it got run over by a combine! At any rate, we spotted the replacement giveaway in the yard.
The poor dog looked like she came out of a National Geographic pictorial of Ethiopia during the famine. We mulled over the prospect of adopting a dog that only had a 50/50 chance of surviving the five-hour ride without an IV drip. We were trying to talk ourselves into “rescuing” it when somebody mentioned the puppies from the mother, that had “just been run over.” All of a sudden, out romped two sister/brother tiny Brindle-colored, cuddly puppies. Since Cheryl’s birthday was coming up, this was a game changer. I bought her the male. At the time it seemed like a minor problem that he had stitches from a hernia at birth. He looked like a cross between an African wild dog and a tiger, so we named him Jomo Serengeti Kenyatta as a tribute to Kenya’s first post-independence president.
No sooner had we put Jomo in the back of our car than he started to grow – over a pound a day. Jomo grew so fast that he kept busting out the stitches of his repeated hernia operations (I paid for four more, including driving him to the veterinary hospital at the state university where he had an intricate, and expensive, three-part operation).
Within one year, Jomo had grown taller than any dog I’d ever seen. When he stands on his hind legs, he is close to seven feet. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the gargantuan canine has a weak stomach. Jomo can only eat prescription dog food. It’s very expensive. If he gets near anything else, the results coming out of either end of him are voluminous and unfriendly. And, of course, he outgrew our largest vehicle in a matter of days. We had to buy an SUV (known as the “Jomobile”). Cheryl’s inexpensive dog had gotten extraordinarily expensive, but things got much worse.
Being a young dog, Jomo was, and still is, playful. He constantly wanted to play with the Schnauzer, Little Dog. However, because Jomo’s head is bigger than the whole sum of Little Dog, Cheryl decided he was making Little Dog’s life miserable. Her conclusion was “we” needed another Great Dane to occupy Jomo’s time. (I don’t think she was thinking about “our time” when she reached that conclusion.)
Lola, a Merlequin Dane (a cross between a Harlequin and Blue Merle) is breathtakingly beautiful, and eats even more furniture than Jomo. Together they absolutely terrorize Little Dog, whose life, I’m convinced, is worse now than ever – and I can clearly relate to that.
Turning to the law, the importance of this column is the vivid illustration of the legal theory of cause and effect. This concept, which is so familiar to law students, teaches that one bad act – in this case, the baiting of dog rescuers, and the switching of them to an extraordinarily expensive puppy that rapidly transformed itself into the Incredible Canine Hulk – can result in compensable damages. Those damages were foreseeable, continue to accumulate, and as far as I’m concerned, the wrongdoers must be punished for their crime.
In fact, about ten days ago, one of my ex-law partners was at a party at my house. His wife mentioned to Cheryl that she was going on vacation, that her husband was leaving town for depositions, and that their poor dog – I’ll call him “Jerk” to protect his identity – was going to have to go to a kennel. Of course, being the caretaker that she is, and without talking to me, Cheryl volunteered to take Jerk for the week.
Jerk, who is purportedly house-trained, apparently doesn’t do so well around Great Danes – or maybe it had something to do with being around me. Furthermore, there was a little problem with Jerk sleeping on the floor in the bedroom with the Great Danes. The Danes kept trying to eat him. Therefore, for the last week, Jerk has been sleeping on the bed with Little Dog, Cheryl and me – usually on top of me.
The foreseeable consequences have been little sleep, grumpiness at work, fighting with my secretary, and an obvious compounding of my damages. The purpose behind writing this column is to find a clever lawyer to take my case and sue the original scheming dog sellers for the chain of events that has befallen me since.
The damages, of course, mount daily, and oh, by the way, once Cheryl brought Lola home…we had to buy a bigger SUV.
©2010 Under Analysis LLC Mark Levison is a member of the law firm Lathrop & Gage LLP. You can reach Under Analysis LLC in care of this paper or by e-mail at comments@levisongroup.com.
|
|