Five Tips on Puppy and Co-Ownership Contracts

BY MATTHEW PALMER, ESQ.

“Acontract is only as good as the paper it’s written on.” It’s something I’ve heard countless times from friends or in discussions of contracts on social media. There seems to be a consensus among the dog community that, absent some blood contract or ancient ritual, contracts are completely worthless. I understand where a lot of the disappointment comes from. Puppy buyers, for example, might disregard the spay/neuter clause in a sales contract and have their puppy snipped at an age much different than what was agreed upon. I’m sure everyone, too, has heard story upon story where friendships have crumbled over a co-ownership agreement gone awry.

There seems to be three big reasons, that I see, why most puppy or co-ownership contracts fail. The first is that contracts have become a recipe, almost, that breeders share with one another, with each taking a tip from here or there and adding it to their current contract. This turns into a game of telephone where what might have been a well-written contract morphs, with each passing, into something barely readable. Some take what they think sounds like a good legal paragraph and uses a dash of it to spice up their own contract (please, please stop doing this). This is no different than my own style of cooking, where every few months or so I will work up the courage to actually cook something. As I go through the motions, thinking that I know what I’m doing, I’ll add a dash of paprika or maybe a pinch of sage in hopes of making something both edible and tolerable. In reality, though, I have no idea what I’m doing. Seriously… I don’t even know where sage comes from! Paprika? No idea what it even is. But I’ve seen them used on the Food Network and feel fancy sprinkling them on my burnt dish. Nevertheless, the end result is the same: I usu- ally throw the food in the trash and resolve to do better next month. This is exactly what people do when they borrow and modify a contract from a friend.

The second error I see so often is much more understandable. Oftentimes the legal world is very harsh to outsiders that don’t speak its language. My first “case”, ever, was before law school where I took a company to small claims court. Before going in, their attorney pulled me aside and, politely–I think–told me it would be hard to prove this case because I didn’t have any “damages”. The attorney kept using words that I kind of knew what they meant… but I didn’t. We ended up settling the case prior to trial, but in hindsight I realized that if I just knew what those words he said really meant, I would have easily won much much more. The words we use in daily life can have much different meanings when used in a legal setting.

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Posted by Alex on Jun 17 2019. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.