Paw & Order: One Columbia law firm is making sure pets have a voice

And while “my dogs are a part of everything I do,” he says Lusk was the one who pushed him in the animal law direction. In 2009, the Maryland legislature helped by enabling the creation of trusts for pets.
How these trusts actually work out in practice, Thienel doesn’t yet know. They’ve only been in existence here three years, and he hasn’t had one go to probate yet.

It’s all part of estate planning, which is one of his specialties. However, most of the pet-related work the firm does involves neighborhood issues, representing homeowner associations regarding what each one may permit or exclude  -- any pets at all, what size and breed, how many, fencing, what kind and how high, keeping pets chained, breeding them and so on.

Howard County offers a particularly good field for this, as the percentage of Columbia residences in homeowner association property is very high, Thienel says.

But some of the cases most interesting to him involve the big and still-growing area of postdivorce litigation over pet custody and visitation.

In addition to exercising visitation rights as a means to distress the ex, “it typically doesn’t work out well, because one or both parties don’t want to see the other person to drop off or pick up the pet -- ‘I just got a divorce from that woman, and I never want to look at her again!’” he says. “Or sometimes it just means a place to push the dog while going on a trip.”

No such worries for Star and Mocha.