Woman Blames Law Firms in Claimed Kitty Caper; NY Case to be Appealed
Darlene Feger still misses Kisses, the Persian cat who disappeared from her New Jersey home seven years ago. And she has the ongoing legal battle to prove it.
After seeing what she believes was a photo of her feline on a website for the Warwick Valley Humane Society 10 days after she went missing in 2002, Feger called to claim her but was told the animal had already been adopted. So she sued the New York animal shelter in state court there, contending that the shelter knowingly accepted a stolen cat and put it up for adoption and had violated a mandatory waiting period, reports the Times Herald-Record.
Her suit sought $86,000 in damages for potential lost income from breeding Kisses, the newspaper notes.
So far, Feger has been fighting a losing battle: A trial court found in favor of the shelter in 2004, and said it didn’t have to reveal the identities of the donor or the new owner, as Feger had sought. (The shelter says the adopted cat Feger saw wasn’t Kisses, and contends a veterinarian’s report shows that it had different characteristics than Feger’s cat.)
But late last month the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, while mostly upholding the trial court ruling, said the shelter does have to tell Feger if the cat came from another shelter, or—as Feger suspects—was brought in either by someone who worked for a law firm near her home, or by someone working for an affiliated law firm located near the shelter. Neither law firm is identified in the newspaper article.
Now Feger is planning to take the case to the New York Court of Appeals, seeking to enforce her property rights in Kisses (animals are treated as property under state law there and elsewhere) and win a ruling that a New York law that mandates a five-day adoption waiting period for dogs also applies to cats, the Record reports.
“You can’t extinguish an owner’s property right unless you give them due process,” argues her lawyer, Douglas Dollinger of Newburgh.
However, attorney Paul Marx of White Plains, who represents the shelter, tells the newspaper that such litigation is harmful and shouldn’t be encouraged.
“Humane societies are given immunity under the law for a reason,” he says. “They do good work for the public at large.”
