To Love, Honor and Belly-Scratch

That bodes well for Los Angeles attorney Sandra Toye, one of a growing number of lawyers in the relatively young field of animal companion law whose mission is to enhance the legal status not merely of pets, but of all animals. In her office at Melrose and Vine, Toye's pet rats scurry about on her desk. "I'm not some animal-rights nut," she says, extricating a rodent from her hair. "I'm levelheaded, I'm conservative, I eat meat. But I'm on a mission to show that animals have value in excess of their replacement value."

In the interests of animals--always a precondition with Toye--she has fought and won several custody disputes in recent years, earning fees in excess of $100,000. (Pet custody is not a poor person's sport.) Toye relishes a fight. When her client's cat was stolen by an ex-boyfriend--who then claimed that the cat had run away--Toye secretly staked out his house for weeks, taking photographs of the cat going in and out, and she threatened him with hefty emotional distress lawsuits until he buckled.

More recently, she won custody of a border collie we'll call Pepperoni. The fallout here was not between a husband and wife but between the client's ex-wife and Pepperoni's breeder. The breeder had given Pepperoni to the wife, her good friend, without any exchange of money or contracts. Then when the marriage went sour, the breeder snatched Pepperoni back by force, claiming that the dog was hers.

Though not a divorce case, Toye employed many of her custody arguments, such as property law, to her advantage. "My argument was that if this dog was proved to belong to my client," she says, "then I needed to ensure that it retained its value." It's an argument that might apply to family heirlooms or works of art, which require specific maintenance. In Pepperoni's case, she hired evaluators to compare the living conditions of the breeder, who kept 50 other dogs at her property, to those of her client, who kept seven, some of which compete in herding trials.

"I claimed he was a show dog even though he wasn't competing," Toye says. "We wanted to take the case to a Superior Court, a court of unlimited jurisdiction, so we had to prove that damages are in excess of $25,000." And after 11 months, and more than $50,000 in legal fees, the breeder conceded and returned Pepperoni to her client for good.