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Speaker 3: About pet pals? Welcome to the O Behave Show on
Pet Life Radio. I'm your host, Arden More. Now I
love all kinds of dogs, mutts, purebreads. On this special
episode today we have a rare breed, a legal bigel. Yeah.
He and his law firm have been championing for the
rights of pet parents and yes, underdogs. Please at this
time give pause and a pause to attorney Jeremy Cohen
from the Boston Dog Lawyers. Welcome, Welcome, Jeremy.
Speaker 4: Thank you so happy to be on O Behavior.
Speaker 3: We're happy to have you. I love what you are
doing and your team, and we're gonna find out what
actually motivated this good attorney to getting into the practice
of pet law. After we take this quick break, so
you all know the drill, We're gonna sit. Stay, We'll
be right back.
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Speaker 2: Let's talk pets on Petlifradio dot Com All behaviors back
with more tail wagging ways to achieve harmony of the
household with your pets. Now back to your fetching host,
America's pet Ed You Jiner Arden More.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to the old Behave show on Pet Life Radio.
I'm I'm your host, Arden Moore. I have a special
guest today and we all need to tune in. He
is attorney Jeremy Cohen. He is from the Boston Dog
Lawyers practice, and we're going to cover a lot of
legal issues affecting our pets. And Jeremy, you know you
could practice any kind of law, but if you could
help our followers, can you tell us a little bit
about what motivated you. I understand it had to do
with your step child's dog, Jesse.
Speaker 4: Right about fifteen years ago. I was a super bored lawyer.
Speaker 3: Super bored lawyer. I put that on a T shirt.
Speaker 4: And also I was underachieving. The goals I had when
I was younger were not materializing. I wasn't making any
type of a difference. And sometimes you just hope and
pray and you just never know if you're going to
be in the right place at the right time. But
I was because my stepkids dog, Jesse, a German shepherd,
had been accused of biting somebody in local town and
because of that, they were holding a hearing to determine what,
if anything, should happen to Jesse and all of the
country when a dog bites or scare somebody, and now
even when it box too much. Cities and towns hold
these types of hearings, okay, and I went to represent
Jesse and Jesse's truner, which was my stepkid's dad, and
the place was packed. Everybody in the hearing wanted Jesse dead.
I couldn't believe it. They were so angry at the
owner that they said, Jesse has got to be removed
not just from the city, but from this earth. And
I knew Jesse. You can imagine. I was just meeting
my future step kids, and nobody's happy to see a
new person in the house. But Jesse was always so
thrilled when that come over. And I love Jesse, taking
him for walks. It was my first dog that I
got to be responsible for, so I felt this was
an important night to represent Jesse, and quickly the hearing authority,
usually a board of selectman, can be a mayor chief
of police got to the decision that Jesse should be euthanized,
and it was all the people in the room their emotions,
saying that Jesse reminded them of an al Qaeda terrorist
laying in my gosh and that, and how much they
wanted to punish the owner because Jesse did have a
history of escaping, especially pet owners, going from the car
to the house. And that's when a lot of us
relax and we think, come on, you know the route
right from the door to the door, and you'll go in.
But if there's a trigger, your dog's going to take off.
And I've seen this so many times, and Jesse would
take off if he saw triggers. But this time he
took off when after a small dog and the woman
trying to protect her dog put her leg up and
he bit it. And suddenly I had to come home
and tell everybody that basically I failed. I didn't know
what happened, but Jesse was determined to be euthanized. And
it's always somebody at these hearings who stocks with this phrase.
Don't get me wrong, I love dogs. That's the person
who is going to make a motion to vote to
euthanize the dog. I've seen it, don't Yes, Yeah, we
needed to appeal it and to figure out how to
save Jesse.
Speaker 3: How did you end up winning the case and saving
Jesse's life?
Speaker 4: We went to court, we made a deal, and at
that time, the deal was that Jesse wouldn't come back
to the town that he was from, but that he'd
be able to live. He just essentially this owner of
this dog, my step kids dad could not own Jesse
again period. So we needed to find a new owner.
And so often it really blurs the line who do
I represent the owner or the pet? But most times
we can rehabilitate the owner through training, for better equipment,
to show the hairing authority of the court you can
trust the owner. In this case, this was before the
law change where you could just banish a dog at
the time, and so we went with that ultimately and
in his last few years Jesse came and lived with me.
Speaker 3: Way excellent, excellent. You know, it is kind of funny
when you get your calling for you it's a bark
and you could practice any kind of law. Can you
tell people a little bit about the Boston Dog Lawyers Group,
Because you've just got a new client. It's a big deal. DWAA.
What does that mean?
Speaker 4: Being able to get a call from the Dog Writers
Association of America saying, we recognize what you do, what
you've been doing for the last ten years, and we
need a lawyer on call just to be with us.
They don't have a lot of legal disputes, but they
need information sometimes and the what that organization does is
always impressed me. And to suddenly be asked to be
part of that, it's It's been an amazing ten years
this year, especially more national recognition. Being on your show
is another great stepping stone for me to be here
because I put my head down and I work hard,
and you don't know if people are going to notice
or not. But I don't even think about that. You
just think about the next dog, the next case, the
next call. We get three calls a day, every day
of the week. Wowy percent of them for around the country.
We have a team of eight now and for some reason,
when we opened it calling it Boston Dog Lawyers, I
made it plural. But who knew. I never knew if
they'd be a second one.
Speaker 3: Well that's called you know, you're optimistic, and that's all right, clairvoyant. Well,
you know, even though it's Boston dog lawyers, you are
representing ones and I want to get some topics covered
because this we could have you on all day, seriously, Jeremy,
and we're definitely going to have to have you on back.
But I want to ask you. There's an area that
I want to talk about, and that's called Ollie's Law,
and that happened in Massachusetts in twenty twenty four. There's
a lot of our folks that follow oh behave that
have dogs that they keep at boarding facilities and doggy daycares.
Many of them are very very well run. My superpower
I teach pet first aid a master instructor with a
real dog and a real cat, and I certify a
lot of boarding facilities and that approved first aid, but
not every place is up to snuff. Right, So I
know that you had a role in Ali's Law. Can
you tell us what was going on? Because it sounded
like this lady that owned Ali, Amy Baxter, some bad
things happened to Ali.
Speaker 4: What happened my client's very diligent pet owner. She had
moved to Massachusetts and she sought out a boarding facility
so Alli would have friends during the day something to do,
and she Ali went. She did a check up of
the facility, felt good about it, and did it like
a dry run. In the first day. All he was there.
Within an hour, something very bad happened and it turns
out that there were six dogs there. The other five
attacked Ali and Ali. The first call that was made
was not to my client, but to the owner of
the boarding facility to say, what should we do. Well,
it's obvious what you should do. You should take the
dog to the vet, except in this instance there was
only one employee there, and that employee was terrified to
leave because she would end up leaving the rest of
the dogs alone. There was a vet two hundred feet away,
a veteran. Oh my gosh, you couldn't even bring the
dog there. Ultimately, they downplayed what happened to Ali called
my client. She went to pick him up, and he
was close to death. He ended up having major internal injuries.
I've seen the record that said more than four hundred punctures.
But ultimately he lived for forty days but succumbed. And
what we came to learn is Allie was just one
of dozens, almost one hundred of calls that I've received
through that time about dogs getting hurt or killed at
boarding facilities.
Speaker 6: And it just lined up that we had the right client,
with the right voice, the right energy, and enough of
an egregious story that this made the papers.
Speaker 4: This got the attention, and it's been true, and it's true.
In most states, boarding facilities are not regulated and it's
not safe for our pets. And when you bring your
pet to a boarding facility, you don't know. We assume
that everything is safe and they want what's best for
your pet, but that's not often the case. There are
some great ones out there, and they're going to get
better because we joined a coalition of about eight people
in the industry called all these law coalitions, and we
ultimately it took two cycles, but we got the law
passed to start regulating boarding facilities.
Speaker 3: Now is it regulating boarding facilities in the state of Massachusetts.
Speaker 4: Or beyond in Massachusetts.
Speaker 3: But that's a good precedent, right, Oh, I wanted to
sound like illegal, bigle.
Speaker 4: That really did?
Speaker 6: You nailed it.
Speaker 4: And because while animal welfare is often on the federal level,
these are state regulations. These would be governed by so
each state legislature could make these rules and regulations. It
was really difficult because you would never believe who would
be again against regulation in the pet industry, who wouldn't
want it to be safer for our pets. But it
became very obvious who doesn't want regulation? And it's very
concerning to me about.
Speaker 3: Who it was doesn't want regulation.
Speaker 4: Well, we're gonna beans no, I can't, I can't come on.
But it's just someone you wouldn't think, a group you
wouldn't think. But the point is we're not trying to
close places down. That's not what we do. We're trying
to make.
Speaker 3: It I'm safe.
Speaker 4: And so now we work with boarding facilities to say
here's what you need to do, and it's basic things.
Do you have a fire emergency plan? If there's a fire,
where are you're going to bring the dogs? Do you
have a place where they can all be chained up
to a fence or something outside kept safer, you know,
with a caller and a leash put on a fence somewhere.
Do you have the basic tools to break up a dogfight?
A CO two cartridge it's so inexpensive, it's just cold air.
It's not gonna hurt anybody, But it's gonna get you
some time to separate the dogs. Do you test dogs
different weights, separate different sizes. Are all your animals who
are in there vaccinated? We want there to be more
than one person on staff, and this has received a
lot of pushback. Well, we only have five dogs there.
If I have a second employee, it won't be cost effective.
But what if something goes wrong with a dog or
with you? What if the person there gets hurt or
has some type of seizure, or the phone wings, or
somebody is at the door but they're in the bathroom,
bathroom break. We want one person there with a driver's
license and a car so that if there's an emergency,
they can go until we have a system of pet
ambulance emergency.
Speaker 3: Oh that's my wish too, Jeremy.
Speaker 4: Yes, I think we're getting closer with Uber starting to
agree to take dogs. We need that. There's so many
people who don't have cars who have an emergency with
their pet. But we can't change everything all at once.
But here, we just need to see the number of
calls to my office. Go down on boarding facilities and
ask questions pet owners when you go there, have they
had any instin has a dog died there recently. If
your pet is going to stay overnight, is there somebody
there overnight to stay with them?
Speaker 3: Exactly. Yeah, We've got some good ones in our area
in Dallas and they have checked those boxes, Jeremy. And
getting them certified in pet first aid is also a
must because pet parents want to know if something happened.
You know, a dog can bleed out in five to
seven minutes with an arterial bleed, and if the vet
clinic is twelve minutes away, they're doa already five to
seven minutes. So those are like my sister boards her
dogs and they have the checkboxes because they want to
make sure that staff has this overnight people.
Speaker 4: I love this.
Speaker 3: So can we get Ali's Law national?
Speaker 4: Well, there's a committee formulating the actual regulations. They'll be
out in six months June of twenty six. Okay, we
just need people in every state to want to be
interested in it, and there are a few states that
already have it, and it's programs like yours that can
make it national. Can say every state needs an always law.
Speaker 3: Oh you know we're going to back in the summer, sir,
We're gonna need to take a quick break, and when
we come back, we're going to talk to attorney Jeremy
Cohen of Boston Dog Lawyers about a New York situation
that is finally kind of regarding pets as real legal
members of the family, the immediate family. We're going to
talk about that after we take this break, So sid stay,
we'll be right.
Speaker 2: Back time for a walk on the red carpet. Of course,
all behave. We'll be backing off lash right after these messages.
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Moore because he's a delight.
Speaker 2: We're back from the lot. Just check the paper and
we had our record showing at the box, the letterbox
that is now back to Oh Behave, here's Harden.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to the Old Behave Show on Pet Life Radio.
I'm your host, Arden Moore. This is one of my
favorite guests because he's a doer, and he's a doer
for pets, and he does it in a legal way.
And he is Jeremy Cohen of the Boston Dog Lawyers.
And Jeremy the next case I wanted to talk to
you about was about a docs and named Duke. And
this was a situation where Duke's I guess it would
be dogmm because it's her son, but Nan was walking Duke.
Pick it up from there.
Speaker 4: It might have been Duke's grand.
Speaker 3: Oh, grant, Oh, yes it is bad. Yes, yeah, grandmama.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Amazing decision by a courageous judge in New York
to say that a pet well considered property in all states,
can be a special type of property. And here stepped
even further to say a dog pet is a member
of the family. And what happened here is Duke with
his walker caretaker grandmother was in a crosswalk in a
car came through and hit the dog in the crosswalk
and severely injuring Duke. And it was witnessed by the
grandmother by Nan and here up until now, for the
most part, witnessing something bad happened to your pet does
not enable you to get any type of financial compensation.
So pet owners often talk about the emotional distress of
seeing something bad happen to their pet, and we know
that is the same distress we feel that if it
was a family member. We know that, But the courts, legislators,
they don't see it that way. And there's a lot
of fear in seeing it that way, because the fear
is that if the value of our pets go up
under the law, then the costs for our pets will
go up. With insurance companies, if veterinarians are accused of
harming a pet, their insurance rates will go up. And
so there's been this great pushback for decades and decades.
In this case, the judge said that Nan could recover
for what happened for being a witness in that same
time and space of when this bad thing happened by
dog getting hit by the car, so much so that
she could recover for that financial damages. And it's not
about the money. This movement recognize pets is more than property.
It's not about the money. It's about if we can
hold people accountable and punish them in their wallets, that's
how we're going to get behavior to change around our pets.
And the judge was very courageous, but also very clear.
This new pet as family member is strictly limited right
now to a dog that's in a crosswalk, that's being
walked in New York and hit by a car.
Speaker 3: All right, well, little step forward, right, I guess right?
Just zone of danger principle is that what this is
all about.
Speaker 4: Right, So if something bad happens to someone in our
family and we don't witness it, you're not in the
zone of danger. So somebody might call and say, people
always think the vet hurt their dog. It's so it's
just not as often as people think. It's very rare.
But if something, let's say there was a misdiagnosis, but
you don't witness that negligent act, you can't recover for it.
So the law wants to help people or compensate people
for witnessing something bad, and it's very strict. One of
the more famous cases is a family that found out
that their son had died in an airplane crash, and
they found out seven hours I think afterwards, and they
wanted to sue for emotional distress and they weren't allowed
to because they weren't at the scene of the crash.
They weren't in the same time and space the zone
of danger. So okay, that's time and space. The zone
of danger is something a little bit more and that,
and we've been using it at our firm. It works.
People are starting to recognize it that if your dog's
being attacked, let's say, buy another dog, you're in the
zone of danger. You might fear that you're being attacked.
So in that zone of danger, Nan could have felt
that she was going to be hit by the car.
So it's a nuanced way of providing emotional distress without
saying it's emotional distress because people aren't ready for that.
Court's aren't ready for that. But that New York case
has led to a case that we recently had. Just
three weeks ago, we got a case.
Speaker 3: Cut off the press here on all behave take it
away Jeremy Cohen from.
Speaker 4: An appeals court judge, a single justice, so that's almost
as high as you can get in the state, who
said in a pet custody matter, it's suggested now that
a pet is not a baseball car collection, the judge wrote,
and that two people who are fighting over a dog,
certainly if they have rights to the dog, the next
layer of review by judges in Massachusetts should be what's
in the best interests of the pet because it is
a family member. And with getting warning like that, well,
it's not all inclusive. It doesn't apply to every case
in every court in Massachusetts. It's something.
Speaker 3: It's another crack in the door right right, just like.
Speaker 4: With New York. It was very narrow, but it was
a step forward. And that's how we have to move
the law for our pets and pet owners, just baby steps.
Accept it, be happy with it, and build on it.
And that's the way the chase things here, because if
we do too much too soon, we're not going to
get anywhere. It's just the state of the law. It's
a state of the people who make decisions in our
society right now, they're not ready for a big chunk.
Speaker 3: I'm betting you're not a bored corporate lawyer anymore.
Speaker 4: Every day the phone rings with something interesting, something we
can work on, and sometimes that case you can change things.
It's a ton of fun.
Speaker 3: Now we could talk all day, But the last one
I want to throw at you is pet nuptials pet nups,
because you were saying that this is a big deal,
especially for the gen z. I mean, a lot of
younger generations, which I love, are realizing that pets are
part of our family, and even they have four legs,
three legs, whatever, squawk. So you're gonna get married, should
you get a pet nuptial agreement?
Speaker 4: If you're going to get a pet with somebody else,
you should get some type of pet nuptial agreement, even
if you're not getting married yet. If you're moving into it,
you have to think. See lawyers think in worst case scenarios,
so it can be a little pessimistic, but you have
to think, what if our relationship doesn't work out. We're adults.
You each form a relationship with your pet. You each
have your own language with the pet, your own bond.
But just because the relationship with each other doesn't work
out doesn't mean your relationship with the pet should end.
And so prepare for that. Have something writing. It can
be on a napkin. Right now. We use text message
to try to piece it together. Something that says if
our relationship ends, we either share the pet fifty to fifty,
or we share costs fifty to fifty, or one person
pays the other one thousand dollars for the pet, or
one person just gives the pet to something.
Speaker 3: I like this.
Speaker 4: I like this, yeah, and just prepare for it, because
what happens is when the relationship ends, you want to
share it for a little while. Maybe you do, but
if there's nothing in writing, it becomes a core case.
Keep it from becoming a core case. Call a lawyer
and spend five percent of what it would normally cost
to fight a custody case to get something in writing
that's enforceable in court. Have a contract with.
Speaker 3: It is a hot button item topic for sure, because
there was a site called kinship that did a survey
in this fall and said more than two thousand pet
parents were surveyed, and get this, everyone three out of
five said, yeah, we would seek legal action against their
exes for custody of their pet. So I do.
Speaker 4: I dog, that's good.
Speaker 3: You can use that.
Speaker 4: That's the beauty of a natural show. You get the
language down, you really do.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's an emotional button too. You know, you
can take my baseball card collection. But don't touch my dog.
Speaker 4: Do something in advance to protect your rights instead of
having to go to court.
Speaker 3: So what is something that a dog has made you
a better person and a better lawyer? Jeremy Cohen.
Speaker 4: Amazingly, it was a case that we lost, and we
were three different courts. We battled for this owner and
this dog, and the dog had a really tough upbringing
and had some major marks on its record, but ultimately
we got a trainer and the behavior just said, this dog,
it can't be rehabilitated. If it's let out, it will
attack again. And that was devastating for me to have
to tell the owner. And I met in person to
tell him, and he insisted on meeting a second time.
When we met the second time, he gave me a
box and in there with the ash to his dog.
And here was a guy that said, I don't care
that we lost. I care that we fought, and you
believed enough in me and then the dog to try
to fight to get the people lined up to try
to make the right decision the right way. Losing, okay,
we can deal with that, but fighting back and making
sure we got to the right decision. So I have
those ashes. It touches me every day.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, Wow, win or lose.
Speaker 4: People need a voice, and that really has made an
impact on me.
Speaker 3: So what can people look for in twenty twenty six,
what's going to happen on the legal front for not
just dogs, but cats, other pets.
Speaker 4: So starting to see states FARDA in particular, setting up
these databases of abusers. If we can keep track of
who's been convicted of abusing an animal or neglecting an animal, sort.
Speaker 3: Of like pedophiles in your neighborhood, right.
Speaker 4: Right, except sometimes it doesn't even have to be that.
It could be pet owners who didn't feed that dog,
or didn't exercise their dog, or didn't feed the cat,
or left them in squalor, so we can keep those
people out of the pet industry. Right now, there's really
no check on people who join the pet industry because
there's no national database on that, even though state database.
I think that's one thing we're going to see. We're
going to see advancements in awarding people. It's never going
to be the life changing money that it should be
when a family member passes due to the fault of
somebody else, but we're going to see behaviors improve because
we're going to keep holding people accountable more and more
for their bad actions or negligent actions. Groomers, trainers, boarding facilities, veterinarians.
If you harm our pet, we just have to hold
you accountable. We don't have to charge you criminally, but
if you were negligent, just be accountable for it. And
we just want to hear more accountability and hold people
accountable so they'll change their behavior.
Speaker 3: What is a superpower a dog has that you wish
you had? And why if you could channel one superpower
a dog has? What would it be.
Speaker 4: To wake up every day happy? It's start every day happy,
an end every day happy? What a much better life
it would be. There's just so many things that can
get in your way or distract you from your happiness,
but not when you're a dog.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a good one. I like that
one a lot. Hey, everybody, we've been speaking with Jeremy
Cohen of the Boston Dog Lawyers. Check out the website,
go ahead and say what it is. How can people
find out and get that phone ringing for you?
Speaker 4: Bostondog Lawyers dot com and you can also reach us
at eight four four Dog at.
Speaker 3: T y oh Snap. That's a good number.
Speaker 4: Yeah, always happy to help answer a question or two.
Better to find out things in events before you jump
into something, and we're happy to help with that.
Speaker 3: Well. I am definitely going to have you back, Jeremy Cohen,
and thank you for sharing some of these things. We
could talk all day, but I wish you live closer
because I would treat you to. I'm actually a licensed bartender.
I'd make you whatever cocktail you'd want, and it could
be a mocktail, but I would do that to celebrate
all that you're doing for pets. And also at this time,
I want to do a shout out to my producer,
Mark Winter. He is the executive producer of Pet Life Radio,
the largest radio network for pets. Humbly, you're on Obehave,
which has been on the air the longest since two
thousand and seven, and we just got awarded the President's
Award by the Cat Writers for our show and we've
been named the top pet podcast. So please check out
our site and all the other guests and hosts of
the different shows on Pet Life Radio, and check out
pet per State for you, like Jeremy Cohen, who's trying
to get good legal care and compassion for pets. I'm
all about saving pet lives with our Vetter Proved program,
So check out pet per Stay for you because we
teach in person, interactive, zoom and now self paced courses
all to different levels and until next time. This is
your flea free host Ard and Moore delivering just two
words to all you two three and four lakers out there.
Speaker 2: All behavior coast to coast and around the world. It's
all behaved with art and more. Find out why cats
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