This Denver suburb allows just three dogs to a family. So it didn’t look good for the couple out on the edge of town when an appliance repairman complained about how many dogs they had.
They had 105. Poodles. White toy poodles. Oodles of poodles.
Either the owners or most of the little black-eyed critters were going to have to go. Distraught, the dog breeders sought legal advice.
This was a case for the dog-law lawyer. They called Linda Cawley.
“It was a nice house,” Cawley recalled. “We sat in the living room. Then I started seeing poodles popping up. There was one in the bookshelf, one in the sink, one on the Lazy Susan. They were just everywhere, having a good time.
“There were about 60 in the back yard. They came running. I pictured being mauled by 60 poodles.”
The joke around Denver is that Rome wasn’t built in a day-but Aurora was. The rapid suburban sprawl behind that humor would be crucial to the defense she prepared.
But come on-105 poodles? This wasn’t going to be easy.
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“Kill the dog! Kill the dog!”
The words ring through Cawley’s suite of law offices in the upper reaches of a downtown Denver high-rise.
Then: “Stab the dog! Stab the dog!”
That would not be an actual order to exterminate an actual canine.
That would be Cawley getting instruction from her investigator, John Strange, on how to wipe out snarling German shepherds guarding Adolf Hitler in a computer game the two of them play between cases.
It’s only a game, with the commendable goal of killing the fuehrer. But when it comes to dogs, Cawley’s heart is soft as moist puppy chow. She loves dogs, their loyalty, how they burrow into your life.
She has trouble with the part of the computer game where she has to kill one. “It hurts to do it,” she says.
Nobody keeps precise score, but Cawley clearly is one of the top dog-law lawyers around. She has applied for a trademark on the term “dog law.” Her toll-free phone number is 800-DOGLAWS. She has talked on national television about barking dogs, and she recently addressed the annual meeting of the New Jersey Groomers and Pet Care Professionals Inc. in Atlantic City.
At any given time, Cawley says, she has 150 or so cases all over the country, some with an oddly human flavor.
There are dogs caught in disputes over custody or overdue dog-support payments. Dogs whose owners want to create a trust fund for them. Dogs who made unwanted sexual advances on other dogs.
Dogs lost by airlines or shot by animal-control officers. Dogs that attacked someone. Dogs accused of conspiring to get other dogs to attack someone. Dogs that bark at people (and, in one instance, a person that barked at a dog).
The California couple called it quits. Keep the quarter-million-dollar house, she said, but give me the Airedale. After a while, the ex-husband had a change of heart. Forget the house. He wanted the Airedale, which he dognapped to Nevada before hiring Cawley to mediate. The ex-wife got the dog back. The man got visitation rights.
Cawley grew up in Cleveland reading “Lassie” and the like, and adoring her collie, Penny.
“I always wanted to be a lawyer, and I always loved dogs,” said the lawyer, whose last name is pronounced suspiciously like Penny’s breed. “But I never thought I’d put the two together.”
She has two German shepherds and a Shiloh shepherd. Their pictures adorn her desk and window sill. Cawley, 32, says she’s not someone who substitutes canine companionship for human family. She says she has no children because she has been married only a few months.
“A lot of my clients do treat dogs as children, elevate them to a status beyond human,” she said. “I don’t see myself that way. My dogs are treated like dogs.”
A Denver woman walking her dog was knocked down when two other dogs crossed the street and raised a ruckus. A golden retriever, trained to help its handicapped owners, joined in the barking but never crossed the street. The woman filed a complaint, saying she was attacked and naming the retriever as a co-conspirator. Cawley for the defense. Case pending.
It started in San Diego, where Cawley moved to practice entertainment law after graduating from Denver University Law School in 1987. She bought a German shepherd puppy and decided the sales contract was deficient.
This, it occurred to her, might be an opportunity. Dog law? Why not? Cawley took out an ad in the Yellow Pages.
One of her first cases turned out to be defending herself.
California animal-control officers busted her at the beach for having a dog off leash. She argued that she and the dog had been playing tug of war with a strand of kelp, which served the purpose of a leash. Case dismissed.
In 1990, Cawley returned to Colorado. The rest is dog-law legend.
Cawley doesn’t do just dogs. There are cat cases. Once, she set up a trust fund for a pet bird. But dogs have proven to be emotionally rewarding and a financial gravy train.
She gives speeches and makes instructional movies on what to do about a neighbor’s barking dog. And she gets invitations from people such as Kennard Budd, president of the New Jersey pet-care group, who caught her on Joan Rivers’ television talk show.
“She was talking about civil cases,” said Budd, who runs a pet grooming and supply business in Medford, N.J. “Linda is able to combine the emotional and the legal. It’s a very interesting topic.”
Caleb, a black lab, sniffed the South Carolina air. Nearby, a golden retriever was ready to mate with a male of the same breed. Lovestruck, Caleb got there first. The retriever’s family, chagrined at the mixed-breed issue of this union, sued Caleb’s owners and won. Cawley was called in, threatened an appeal, and wangled a reduced payment.
Cawley has tapped into something deep in the human psyche and, for all we know, the canine brain as well.
“The dog is a companion animal,” she explained. “That’s the whole idea. My interest is in preserving the emotional companion relationship between man and dog.”
The law considers pets as property. Somebody loses it or damages it, they pay to replace it.
To many people, however, dogs are family.
“They will call their dogs little boys or little girls,” Cawley said. “They’ll call and say, `My little boy died, he was killed,’ and it turns out her little boy was a 15-year-old poodle.
“It’s different when you’re dealing with a live animal. You’re not talking about a refrigerator here.”
Cawley acknowledges that dog people can be intense. Poodlewise, the Aurora case wasn’t even her personal best. She once helped a Chicago woman who had 140 poodles.
A man in Lakewood, Colo., was in his back yard when the neighbor’s dog barked at him. He barked back and then called police to complain. “Yeah, I woofed at the dog,” the man told officers. The city blamed him, not the neighbor, charging him with animal cruelty. Cawley for the defense. Case pending.
And what of the Aurora couple with their plethora of poodles?
Cawley found that they had moved to their large house on more than an acre in the early 1960s precisely to pursue their poodle passion. The area had been annexed into mushrooming Aurora in 1967. The zoning complaint wasn’t until 1991.
Maybe there was a technical violation, Cawley argued, but the family was devoted to the dogs, the neighbors hadn’t complained, and a veterinarian hired by the city said the dogs were in good health, she said.
“Nobody was bothered by this,” Cawley said.
The city agreed to make an exception. The poodles stayed.
