Pet Sharing
Half a Pet is Better Than None;
Animal time-shares help double the love
By Sandra PesmenJoint custody is going to the dogs. Like folks who share a spring-break rental in Florida, some people with pets also learn to work out amicable time-sharing.
Take Nancy, 73, and Bob Plotkin, 76, of Chicago’s Near North Side, and Kathryn Lehar, 62, of Albany Park, who all take care of Beverly, a 10-year-old blond German Shepherd mix. Nine months ago Beverly belonged to Lehar, an artist and sculptor who also works as a librarian at the Chicago Public Library’s Budlong Woods branch. She brought the dog to stay 10 days with her friends, the Plotkins, because she was going out of town. And that was the beginning of Beverly’s double life.
It’s not as if Beverly was a stranger to moving. Her first family adopted her as a pup in 1995. They divorced in 1999 and brought the dog to the Anti-Cruelty Society. Soon afterward, Lehar’s daughter, Denyse, who then lived in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village, adopted her from the shelter. She later moved with Beverly into Lehar’s home.
“Then Denyse fell in love with her pen pal in Australia, and I brought Beverly to stay with the Plotkins while I went to their wedding.” Lehar says. But when Lehar returned to pick up her dog, she saw how deliriously happy Beverly was with the couple. “I couldn’t take Beverly away from them,” she remembers. “I work all day and one of them usually is at home. Beverly is a very social dog and she doesn’t get nearly that much attention from me.”
But a week later Lehar called the Plotkins and recanted. “I couldn’t eat or sleep and I cried all night because I missed Beverly,” she says. That’s when Beverly moved into a time-share. The friends decided half a dog is better than none, and agreed to each keep Beverly two weeks at a time. Beverly now has two sets of ID tags, two veterinarians, two dog parks, many pet names, and two homes where humans are sappy with love for her.
This is a committed relationship between the dog and her guardians, who promise to care for her in sickness and in health. So whenever Beverly gets sick, the caretaker who is “on watch” foots the bill.
Similarly, Robin Stiebel, who boards dogs in her Lincolnshire home, had joint custody of her now-deceased dog Shayna written into her divorce decree in 2001. “My ex [got] Shayna for me after we’d been married two years and we [had] her together seven years,” Stiebel recalls. “When we divorced, joint custody was the one thing we didn’t fight about. From the time we separated I kept the dog weekdays and he took her weekends. We even agreed to share costs of her food, medical bills, and health insurance.” The two exes shared Shayna in that way for many years. Stiebel is now involved in another dog share with her mother’s 10-year-old Keeshond who stays with her each February to March while her mother vacations in Florida.
“Dog sharing isn’t an entirely new idea, but these people have brought it to a whole new level,” says Steve Dale, author of the syndicated column “My Pet World” and host of two pet radio shows. “Historically, firehouse dogs probably were the first to be shared, not by two families, but by all the firemen in the firehouse and their families.” For these dogs (mostly Dalmatians), it was often stressful since they were being traded from fireman to fireman and being treated differently at each person’s house.
But in Beverly and Shayna’s cases, this lifestyle seems to be the better of two worlds. “For someone who works, it’s like having permanent doggie day care, not the rotating life firehouse dogs had,” Dale says. “The question I’m asked most is, ‘What does a dog want more than anything in the world?’ The answer is, ‘After food and water, all your dog wants is you. [She] wants human companionship.’”
Dale himself has been part of a dog share. Since Dale works from a home office, he and his wife, Robin, took in a neighbor’s dog weekdays while she went to work, and the dog often stayed later if the [neighbor] went out in the evening. “When you count up the hours, the dog probably spent more time with us than she did downstairs.”
As with children, the routine must be reasonably consistent. As long as the primary people remain the same, and they keep similar rules, the dog will thrive. And there are clear advantages for these folks that also benefit the animal. The most obvious is that they never burn out. They all have regular two-week rests from responsibility. For 14 days at a time they can sleep later without letting the dog out. They don’t have to race home to feed and walk her. More importantly, they never have the worry or expense of boarding their dogs or hiring dog sitters when they go away.
But some wonder if it makes dogs sad to leave one happy home for the other. Dale doesn’t think so and offers an analogous example. “When Grandma comes to visit the children from out of town, she plays with them, buys them presents and candy and generally spoils them,” he says. “They love her and it makes them sad for a while when she leaves. But you wouldn’t want them to miss the whole wonderful visit with Grandma because of that temporary sadness at the end, would you?”
Stiebel agrees. “If I go over to visit my mom when she’s in town and Shadow sees me getting ready to leave, he’ll go to the door, get his leash and show that he wants to come with me because there are more dogs and more action at my house,” Stiebel says. “But we both pet him a little and he gets over it.”
While joint custody works for some people, others just don’t get it. At a recent dinner party, Nancy Plotkin described Beverly’s unusual lifestyle and the woman sitting next to her said, “Oh, that’s a great idea. I share my jewelry with a friend.”
