Dogs will remain firmly entrenched as property in Texas, according to an opinion handed down today by the state’s supreme court. In a case closely followed by organizations on all sides of the animal personhood debate, the court ruled that although people form close bonds with their companion animals, they are not entitled to recover emotional damages when that pet is killed. Such damages, the court said, would place pets on the same legal level as spouses, parents, and children.

The case has its origins in 2009, when Kathryn and Jeremy Medlen’s mixed-breed dog Avery escaped from their backyard and was collared by Fort Worth animal control. Jeremy tried to recover the canine, but he didn’t have enough money to pay the fees. The shelter said it would hold the dog until he came back, but one of its workers, Carla Strickland, accidentally placed Avery on the euthanasia list, and the dog was put down. The Medlens sued Strickland for sentimental damages (since, as a mixed-breed the dog had no market value), winning in a Texas court of appeals in 2011. “The special value of ‘man’s best friend’ should be protected,” it ruled. The opinion caused a paradigm shift, reversing an 1891 state supreme court decision that held that when a dog was killed, owners could only collect for the pet’s “market value” and “special or pecuniary value”. In that case, three Newfoundlands were poisoned, and the court allowed $5 for the market value of each dog and an additional $20 each because the dogs had special training that allowed them to communicate the gender of approaching individuals. 

The 2011 court of appeals decision was emblematic of a growing openness among judges and legislators to consider cats and dogs more than mere property. Pets didn’t even merit that legal status until the turn of the twentieth century, when courts began to rule that dogs—and later cats—were not worthless objects, as the common law held, but rather property of their owners that had inherent value. By the latter half of the century, some lawmakers were going even further. In 1964, a the Supreme Court of Florida ruled that a woman could recover $3000 in damages, including compensation for “mental suffering” when her daschund was killed by a garbage collector.  In 1980, a New York judge allowed a woman to recover loss of companionship damages, which are usually restricted to spouses and children, when her German Shepherd died mysteriously at a kennel. And for the last couple of decades, courts have increasingly allowed divorcing couples to fight over the custody of beloved pets, giving the animals a status akin to children. Meanwhile, a number of states have drafted legislation allowing owners to collect thousands of dollars in non-economic damages for the loss of their pet.

Today’s supreme court decision, however, sets the clock back to 1891. In a unanimous opinion, the judges acknowledge that “Texans love their dogs” and that owners don’t view their pets as personal property, “but as beloved friends and confidants, and even family members.” But they said that allowing emotional damages for pets would raise their legal status above grandparents and human best friends, who can’t recover such damages when their grandchildren or friends are killed. “The Medlens request something remarkable,” the court said. “That pet owners have the same legal footing as those who lose a spouse, parent, or child.”

The court seems to have relied heavily on organizations that submitted advice in the form of so-called amicus briefs. These include the American Kennel Club, the Cat Fanciers’ Association, and the American Veterinary Medical Association. All argued that allowing non-economic damages for pets would hurt their industries. The AVMA, for example, has stated that permitting such damages would flood the courts with litigation, put vets out of business, and ultimately harm companion animals by reducing their access to care.

Ironically, the Medlins were not pushing for pet personhood. They just wanted Avery to have the same status as any other piece of irreplaceable property.Texas law allows the recovery of sentimental damages for the loss of family heirlooms, like wedding veils and jewelry. Why not for pets, they argued. Why would a taxidermied version of Avery be worth more than Avery himself? While the court acknowledged the irony, it said that allowing owners access to such damages would create legal headaches. Should only dogs and cats be eligible, it asked. What about fish and pythons? Should owners of a frail, 15-year-old mutt be allowed to collect more than those of a prize-winning purebred?

Still, the judges didn’t completely shut the door on pets achieving a more person-like status in the eyes of the law. “Social attitudes inexorably change,” they wrote, “and shifting public views may persuade the Legislature to extend wrongful-death actions to pets.” The question is, will it take another hundred years?

This isn't Blackie... but perhaps he's talking. (Credit: Tom Adriaenssen, Flickr.com)

Carl Miles credited his psychic ability with his decision to adopt a jet black cat one day in 1975. Unemployed in his mid 20’s, and staying at a Columbia, South Carolina rooming house, he initially said no when a girl cradling a box of three kittens came to the porch, asking if he wanted one. Then a premonition struck. As a boy, Miles claimed he could see things before they happened—things people were about to say, or about to do. He had that feeling again on the porch. “As she was walking away, something told me in my mind, ‘Take the black cat’,” he later told The Charlotte Observer. “And I called her back.”

One afternoon, when the kitten—now named Blackie—was about five months old, Miles had him on his lap, playing with him and talking to him. A premonition struck again. A voice inside his head said, “The cat is trying to talk to you.” At that moment, Miles resolved to teach Blackie to speak. He spent the next year and a half taping the noises the kitten made, and he’d play him back the ones that sounded most like English. By his second birthday, Blackie was able to say “I love you” and “I want my momma.” The cat was ready for prime time.

Miles and his wife paraded Blackie down the streets of Columbia, the cat in a harness and draped over the man’s shoulder. When passers-by would inquire about the feline, Miles offered to make him speak, usually for a quarter or two. He’d squeeze Blackie’s rump, and if people used a bit of imagination, they’d swear they just heard a cat talk. (Listen for yourself here at the 25-second mark.) “Blackie the Talking Cat” became famous. He was interviewed on radio shows, appeared on TV’s “That’s Incredible!”, and even cut a 45 rpm record: “A Special Christmas featuring Blackie the Cat that Talked.”

By 1982, Miles and his wife had taken their act to Augusta, Georgia. And that’s where they ran into trouble.

Responding to complaints from local citizens evidently unnerved by hearing a cat speak, police charged the couple with operating a business without a license. Miles fought the city. He noted that its laws did not define a talking cat as a business. He also argued that Augusta was violating the U.S. Constitution’s right to freedom of speech—both his and Blackie’s. The judge would have none of it. Though he himself had heard Blackie talk—thanks to a chance encounter with the Mileses on the streets of Augusta—he concluded that the cat was the couple’s sole source of income and thus constituted a business. In a ruling that referenced everything from Garfield to Dr. Seuss, the judge wrote:

For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, people have carried on conversations with cats. Most often, these are one-sided and range from cloying, mawkish nonsense to topics of science and the liberal arts. Apparently Blackie’s pride does not prevent him from making an occasional response to this great gush of human verbiage…

But just because Blackie talked back, the judge noted, didn’t exempt him from the laws of the city.

Miles appealed the decision. A federal court, however, was no more understanding. In 1983, The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit pronounced Miles’s argument that Blackie did not represent a business “wholly without merit.” It also addressed the Constitutional issue:

This Court will not hear a claim that Blackie’s right to free speech has been infringed. First, although Blackie arguably possesses a very unusual ability, he cannot be considered a “person” and is therefore not protected by the Bill of Rights. Second, even if Blackie had such a right, we see no need for appellants to assert his right jus tertii [“by a third party”]. Blackie can clearly speak for himself.

Defeated, Miles got the business license. And though he continued to sell T-shirts sporting his loquacious feline, Blackie’s fame waned. In 1989, Miles, suffering from cataracts, stopped exhibiting the cat. He moved his wife and the feline back to South Carolina. People still stopped by from time to time, however, to hear Blackie talk. A couple of days after Christmas in 1992, Blackie died. He was 18 and suffering from seizures, liver failure, and heart problems. In the parking lot of the veterinarian, Miles and his pet had a final conversation. “Blackie looked at me one last time and said, ‘I love you.’,” he told The Charlotte Observer. He and his wife buried the cat in their back yard. As far as anyone knows he’s still there, under a patch of weeds.

Blackie’s voice may have been silenced, but his words echo on in one of the most unusual free speech cases in U.S.history.

The three Henrys: Bergh, Bliss, and Ford. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

On September 13, 1899, a dour-looking Manhattan real estate salesman named Henry Bliss stepped off a streetcar near Central Park. As he turned back to the trolley to help his female companion disembark, an electric taxicab struck him. The carriage-like vehicle knocked Bliss to the pavement and ran over his head and body, crushing both. When he died the next morning, he became America’s first pedestrian killed by an automobile.

Bliss’s death signaled a new era for New York. The city’s streets had once been fluid with horses. Hundreds of thousands of the animals towed railroad cars and fire wagons, barges and slaughter carts. The metropolis ran on its horses—and it worked them to death. The animals were so plentiful that it was cheaper to buy new ones than to properly care for them. And so drivers starved them, whipped them bloody, and left them to die on the side of the road when they collapsed. Too heavy to move, their bodies were allowed to rot until they had decomposed enough for wagons (drawn by horses) to pick them up and dump them in the river—or ship them to factories that turned them into glue, grease, and fertilizer. Horses can live for more than 30 years; in mid-nineteenth-century New York, they were lucky to reach their second birthday.

Disgusted with this state of affairs, a privileged Manhattanite named Henry Bergh gathered his high-society friends in 1866 and petitioned the New York state legislature to create the first animal protection organization in the United States. He called it the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Though Bergh was concerned with the plight of all creatures great and small, he focused much of his attention on horses. He lobbied for tough welfare laws that made it a crime to beat or overwork the animals, and he patrolled the streets with fellow members of the ASPCA, scanning for cases of cruelty. Bergh pulled abusive drivers off their wagons, created the first ambulance for injured horses, and caused daylong traffic jams when he ordered passengers to disembark from overloaded streetcars, some holding more than 100 people and pulled by just two horses. Newspapers branded him “The Great Meddler.”

But Bergh eventually won the public’s respect. And he helped create a culture of kindness towards animals the likes of which New York—or America for that matter—had never seen. “Almost every fourth person knows him by sight, and the whisper, ‘That’s Henry Bergh,’ follows him, like a tardy herald, wherever he goes,” read an 1879 article in Scribner’s Monthly. By the time Bergh died in 1888, the ASPCA had prosecuted 120,000 cases of cruelty and inspired 37 of the 38 states to enact strong animal welfare laws, many of which were enforced by local SPCAs modeled after Bergh’s society.

But the clip-clop of the horse eventually gave way to the buzz of the automobile—and no man did more to make this happen than Henry Ford. Cars had been around since the 1880s, but the Michigan industrialist found a faster way to make them. Much faster. Ford’s adoption of the assembly line allowed his factories to assemble a car in less than two hours, and by 1918, half of the autos in the U.S. were Model Ts. Thousands zoomed the streets of New York. Though a Model T didn’t kill Henry Bliss, the car and its kin ended the reign of the horse.

The ASPCA had to move on to new animals. And indeed, by the turn of the century, it had already begun focusing much of its attention on cats and dogs. Both pets had firmly established themselves in the human home, but they had virtually no legal protections until Henry Bergh’s organization came around. The anticruelty laws the ASPCA helped create also applied to cats and dogs, giving them their first true legal protections—the right to be free from pain and suffering.

Dog catchers apparently didn’t get the memo. These rogue agents made their living selling lost dogs and cats back to their owners, and little appears to have dissuaded them from making these pets go “missing” in the first place. Newspapers of the time are replete with tales of dog catchers prowling yards, snatching animals from distracted owners, and even beating people up to steal their pets. When the dog catchers couldn’t sell these animals, they packed them into iron cages and drowned them in the river.

The public was outraged. New York turned to the ASPCA for help. In 1894, the society agreed to take over the city’s animal control duties. It created humane shelters, developed kinder methods of euthanasia, and continued to fight for the welfare of cats and dogs. Since then, thanks to the efforts of the ASPCA and other animal organizations, nearly every state has adopted felony anti-cruelty laws, Congress recently passed an act requiring that the needs of pets be considered during natural disasters, and legislatures across the U.S. are pushing to create animal abuser registries akin to those for sex offenders.

Today, cats and dogs are the most legally protected animals in the country. And it all started with a few guys named Henry.