Miss Carole Nelson Douglas Sighs Heavily
Midnight Louie is such a seasoned diplomat … if you define diplomat as one who insults all sides equally.
He is right, though, that this note is going to be dull. Still, animal lovers need to think early and often about how to safeguard our surviving animals.
In most states, that will take a living trust, which sounds scarier than it is.
First, we as pet owners—and that’s how the law regards us and our charges—need to designate relatives or neighbors to step in and take custody of any animals in the event of our sudden deaths.
The pet owners’ dream is that some wonderful animal-loving soul would want to be an heir of their estate, move into their desirable house, and keep the environment stable until each of the surviving animals dies in turn. Say in, oh, fourteen years.
Good luck. Only the very wealthy have estates worth enough that it pays other people to forsake their homes and life situations to babysit the estate owners’ babies until they shuffle off this mortal coil. Many a comic mystery plot has been set around these circumstances.
The fact is, the situation is always more tragic than comic.
So, unless you want your animal companions to fall into the clutches of a Cruella De Vil, you will designate the veterinarian who will see the animals and be a temporary expert in their ultimate disposition and whose facility will be a temporary boarding place in case of your incapacitation or death.
Owners have choices, all hard. Realistically, relatives and friends cannot integrate all your pets into their homes and lives as one unit. If you’re lucky, you have enough of both so that all your animals will get a chance to join another household. But most people, even your best-intentioned nearest and dearest, are not experts at integrating multiple households.
You can assign a shelter to evaluate the animals and place them in loving foster homes and ultimately new homes.
You can decide to employ the “kindest cut of all”—a visit to the vet, like any other, after all—that will put them “to sleep, perchance to dream.”
Or, you can set up a living trust, designating a person who will inherit an appropriate amount of money to supervise all this, often a lawyer. And who trusts lawyers? Enter again the comic mystery plots, which are not really funny to the suddenly homeless but beloved animals involved.
One option is interesting. Leave your animals to a deserving established shelter, which will essentially pet-sit them in your house until their deaths, at which time the shelter will get the house as an asset to do good animal works. Well, you better have a really valuable house. Also, such shelters run on volunteer workers and they have turnover, and sometimes suddenly run out of funding, not a very stable situation for your pets.
Oh, Louie, you did leave me with the most ungrateful job…!
The bottom line is that we need to look into these options NOW. Meow. Me too.
I was first sent a book on this subject several years ago by Lisa Rogak, author of PerPETual Care: Who Will Look After Your Pets If You’re Not Around? It’s available online.
Here are some other books and online sites that can help get you started:
When Your Pet Outlives You: Protecting Animal Companions After You Die, by David Congalton and Charlotte Alexander
All My Children Wear Fur Coats: How to Leave a Legacy for Your Pet, by Peggy R. Hoyt, JD, MBA
NOLO Legal Solutions: “Providing for Your Pet After You Die”: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/article-29534.html
VeterinaryPartners: “Planning for Your Pets in Your Will”: http://www.veterinarypartner.com/Content.plx?P=A&A=1674&S=4