Are pets included in your child custody schedule?

As you go through a divorce, you and your spouse have to decide how to divide custody of the children. At the same time, you have to split up all of the assets that you own. You’re essentially just dividing your lives together, and this can be somewhat complicated to get through.

One question that you may run into is what to do with your pet. If you’re making a child custody schedule already, is the pet going to be included in that schedule?

Pets are (legally) property

You certainly can include the pet in the child custody schedule if you would like. Many parents do this because they both still want to see the pet, they want to share the responsibility of taking care of it and the children enjoy knowing that the pet is always going to be at the house that they are living in.

But, what you need to realize is that doing something like this has to be a voluntary decision by both you and your ex. You can agree to share ownership if you would like, and you can agree to put the pet on your child custody schedule. But the court is not going to order that. This has to be done voluntarily because your pet is property and would otherwise be divided with the rest of your assets.

Of course, counting pets as property makes sense from a legal perspective, but can be concerning to people who think of the pet as part of the family. But it is still important to understand that legal perspective as you move toward a divorce so that you can know how to approach it. You also want to know about all of the various options at your disposal and what steps to take to accomplish your goals.