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S tan Brock played offensive tackle for the New Orleans
Saints and the San Diego Chargers for 16 years. He coached
the now-defunct Portland Forest Dragons arena football team
from 1998-1999 before moving on to coach the Los Angeles
Avengers.
In May
of this year Tennessee became the first state to pass a
law providing for non-economic damages for pets that are
killed through negligence or intentional acts of cruelty.
"You
can't put a dollar figure on the value of those two dogs
and how much they meant to us," says Stan Brock. "You can't
give me enough money to replace them."This would open the
door to all sorts of frivolous suits.... People who have
suffered real damages...would be stuck in line behind the
case for Fido.
--Victor
Schwartz
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When Stan Brock found Jake dead in the bushes, the last
thing on his mind was making legal history.
Just two days earlier Brock had wrenched an arrow from
the torso of his other chocolate lab, Rookie. When Washington
County sheriffs were slow to investigate that killing, Brock
did his own field work. He brought the arrow around to local
hunting stores and started asking questions. He hired a
professional tracker. On Sept. 6 he found Jake's body near
the rented home of a neighbor he'd never met before, Brian
Rowe.
To say Brock comes from a strong family is an understatement.
His father was a Portland cop for 23 years. Like three of
his brothers, he played pro football. His 6-foot 6-inch,
270-pound body stood up to 16 years of NFL abuse. But the
sight of Jake's body hit him hard. He considered Jake and
Rookie much more than animals. When he used to tell his
four daughters to go fetch their brothers, he was talking
about the dogs.
Rowe later confessed to the killings. The only motive he
offered was a vague claim that he was defending some feral
cats from the dogs. He faces two counts of felony animal
assault, a charge that could bring him 10 years in prison.
In addition to being prosecuted in criminal court, Rowe
will also be sued in civil court, in a case that could establish
a new legal precedent in Oregon by treating pets, in civil
matters, less like property and more like people.
For a long time, pets in Oregon and other states have been
treated pretty much like lawn furniture when it comes to
figuring out their value in courts. If your neighbor's runaway
rototiller sent Fluffy to an early grave, he was legally
liable for the cost of a new cat, nothing more. That archaic
notion has been evolving, but slowly. The Brock case could
accelerate the pace of that legal change.
Despite Rowe's confession, Brock and his family worried
about how the courts would handle the case. So they contacted
the Portland office of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which
referred them to lawyer Geordie Duckler. Duckler jumped
all over the case.
About one-quarter of Duckler's case load consists of pet
owners who feel they have been wronged. But he'd never seen
a case like this one before. Between the popularity of the
Brocks, the gruesome cruelty of the killings and the extensive
coverage of the story in the television news, Duckler knew
he had a keeper. Here was an ideal opportunity to become
the first lawyer in Oregon to convince a jury to award a
family damages for the loss of an animal's companionship.
The loss-of-pet-companionship legal theory is relatively
new, Duckler explains. Because most cases get settled before
reaching courts, there is no legal precedent in Oregon.
"A lot of my clients aren't the richest people in the world,"
says Duckler. "They want to get some money to compensate
for what they've been through. The Brocks are different.
They could care less about the money. Stan Brock came to
me with a moral command."
The Brocks are asking for $200,000. They know that Rowe
doesn't have that kind of cash, but they're looking to make
sure he pays for his crime with whatever money he has, and
to send a message to others: Domestic animals are more than
property.
It's clear when you talk to Stan Brock, his wife Lori and
their four daughters that they considered Rookie and Jake
family. In many ways, life at their rural Washington County
home revolved around the dogs. "I always called it dog heaven
up there," says Lori. "They had a great life. They had a
pond to swim in, they had all their neighborhood dogs that
they would play with, we even had special furniture in our
house that no one else was allowed to sit on, because it
was for the dogs."
The Brock case is part of an ongoing trend toward placing
more value on the relationship between people and pets.
As Druckler asks, "Where do you put an animal in the spectrum
between a pair of shoes and a child?"
Today's courts are gradually being forced to answer that
question. Over the past decade, juries have gone from awarding
a few hundred dollars, at most, to awarding as much as $35,000
in compensation for an injured pet. Law schools are following--or
perhaps leading--the trend. Whereas five years ago only
a handful of schools offered courses in animal law, today
a dozen do, including Northwestern School of Law at Lewis
& Clark College.
Some legal scholars herald the change in attitude and law
as progress long overdue. "The courts are still in the 18th
century on this issue," says Steven Wise, a law professor
and author of Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Rights
for Animals. "Courts are supposed to compensate people
for the actual damage they suffer. Most people who have
companion animals consider them part of the family, even
children. When that animal is killed or injured, these people
suffer real emotional damage. They don't care about the
loss of whatever negligible economic value the animal might
have had. It's the loss of the relationship that they care
about."
Others, however, warn that cases like the Brocks', appealing
as they may seem, can set dangerous precedents about so-called
"soft damages"--those that don't match a measurable economic
compensation. "The floodgates will open any time you allow
a jury to award soft damages," says Victor Schwartz, general
counsel to the American Tort Reform Association and co-author
of the most widely used torts casebook in the nation, Cases
and Materials on Torts.
"There is no way to measure these damages objectively,"
he says. "If the courts open to these types of cases, you'll
see ads in the paper: 'Have you lost a pet?' This would
open the door to all sorts of frivolous suits, and that
would block the way for people who have suffered real damages
that can be measured. Those people would be stuck in line
behind the case for Fido."
Besides, Schwartz argues, "Money can never restore the
companionship that was lost."
The Brocks don't dispute that last point. That's why, Brock
says, if the family does win a judgment, the money will
go "somewhere where it can be used, maybe to help fight
these kinds of cases from now on."
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