Raining Cats, Dogs, And Hypocrisy By Cindy Simpson
So many dog stories making headlines these days -- might cats be feeling a bit jealous?
A privileged feline named Boots, who "walked from a bizarre death sentence," was the star in this recent post by Professor Jonathan Turley:
Boots was the pet of Georgia Lee Dvorak of Berwyn, Illinois. When Dvorak died, she specified in her will that 11-year-old Boots should be put to death. However, the executor of her $1.3 million will -- the Fifth Third Bank -- could not get themselves to euthanize the friendly cat. So they went to court and got the language set aside in a rare judicial intervention.
"We didn't want to euthanize this healthy, living animal," said bank senior vice president Jeffrey Schmidt. The judge agreed, and arrangements were made for the cat to be adopted into a "loving home."
"It raises an interesting question of the limits of a person in specifying conditions in a will," according to Turley. "While animals are property, they have more protections than a sofa."
The comments on Turley's post are quite revealing -- most in sympathetic support of the bank, the judge, and the cat.
Proper judicial intervention? Or law compromised in the name of compassion? Who can help but note the inconsistency among liberals as to the proper role of the courts, application of the law and privacy rights, and further, the stunning hypocrisy when it comes to regard for the life of a pet versus an unborn baby? In the progressive legal view, both pets and sofas in estates apparently have more protection than do unborn children.
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