He handles custody disputes, death row cases, and biters. He’s Salem’s dog lawyer.

Once a reluctant law student, Jeremy Cohen is now one of the country’s fiercest advocates for canine clients and their owners.

Jeremy Cohen knew the direction his legal career would take when Jesse was sentenced to death.

Jesse was a biter. He had chomped on a woman’s leg in Marblehead and nipped at a couple of smaller dogs. Enough was enough. In 2008, the town’s Select Board declared Jesse a “dangerous dog” who would have to be euthanized. But Jeremy loved Jesse, the German shepherd owned by his fiancée’s ex-husband and their two teenage kids. There must be a way to save him.

He called F. Lee Bailey, the famed defense attorney whom he’d met a few times. “Nothing you can do,” Bailey replied.

Cohen called Steven Wise, the animal rights attorney who later became president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, a nonprofit organization. (Wise died in February this year.) Wise gave him an angle: Because animals don’t have legal rights in such hearings, talk about the owner’s rights. Where was the due process? The right to cross-examine the witnesses, to review all the evidence? It was unconstitutional!

Cohen took the advice. At an appeal hearing, he argued that Jesse and his owner were deprived of due process. The people who ordered euthanasia had never met Jesse, never had an expert evaluate his behavior — how could they sentence him without enough evidence? They had not probed whether something had triggered the bite, or whether Jesse was an inherently dangerous dog, or if he could be trained and restrained to be safer. In the end, the clerk-magistrate agreed: Jesse could live, provided he get training, be kept on a leash, and never set paw in Marblehead again.

No problem: Jesse moved in with Cohen in Salem and lived out his life with his attorney and soon-to-be stepdad.

“It changed my life,” Cohen tells me.

News of the exoneration spread, and the lawyer started getting calls from other pet owners. They called with capital punishment cases, grievances against kennels for negligence in dog care, messy divorces involving custody battles over the family dog.

Cohen was so successful and motivated by these cases that he sold his debt collection business and in 2016 opened Boston Dog Lawyers, a firm devoted primarily to his new clientele. (He’s also represented cats, horses, pigs, chickens, turkeys, turtles, snakes, an iguana, and a parrot.)

The idea is not as odd as it may have seemed at the time. Over the years, Americans’ relationship with animals has changed, and our laws have changed with it. In most states, animal abuse has gone from a misdemeanor to a criminal offense. Veterinarians in Massachusetts, along with 21 other states, are required to report suspected cases of animal abuse to the authorities, just as pediatricians must with suspected child abuse. The FBI now assigns animal abuse cases to the same categories as other major crimes. Laws protecting farm animals from inhumane confinement have been passed in several states, including Massachusetts.

“Poll after poll after poll has shown that Americans care very deeply about animal protection issues and animal welfare,” says Chris Green, executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund and former director of the animal law program at Harvard Law School. As a result, this corner of the legal field has undergone “a massive explosion.”

More than 160 law schools now have courses that teach animal law, Green says. That includes everything from wildlife protection, to farm animal treatment, to trafficking in endangered species. And one small but growing specialty of the law involves advocating for pets and their owners.

Fewer than a dozen attorneys practice pet law full time in America, and Cohen is among the most skilled and prominent. (Not bad for someone whose first-year classmates at Suffolk University Law School jokingly voted him “least likely to return” and “most likely to need a lawyer himself.”)

These days, Cohen’s caseload is spiking. Nearly 1 in 5 households in the country welcomed a new cat or dog during the COVID pandemic, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and more and more people are realizing that owning a pet can be a complicated business — not only in terms of caregiving, but legally as well. And that’s where Jeremy Cohen’s services come in.

“Jeremy’s an anomaly,” says Kara Holmquist, director of advocacy for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “He’s probably the first person I know to transform his whole legal practice to dealing with animal issues.”

COHEN IS NO ONE’S IDEA of Atticus Finch, the lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird. He doesn’t look like Gregory Peck (who among us does?), nor does he speak in mellifluous tones. In court, his sentences come out in bursts as he recalls and deploys legal precedents. With his graying hair, craggy face, and suits that seem to hang off his body, he comes across as more rumpled than refined. But for many pet owners, he gets outcomes that feel like legal miracles in court.

I watch him in action during a hearing of the Tisbury Select Board, held over Zoom in July. The purpose is to decide whether to designate a 69-pound husky named Scooby a “dangerous dog” — a label that, under Massachusetts law, requires an escalating series of measures to protect the public, from muzzling to fencing to, in some cases, euthanasia. I had read Scooby’s case file a day earlier and told Cohen that I didn’t see how he could possibly defend him.

As the hearing begins, Heather Maciel, Tisbury’s animal control officer, lays out the evidence. It’s grim. Scooby has bitten four people over a seven-month period — both off-leash and on — all allegedly unprovoked and two resulting in trips to the ER for stitches. The most recent incident happened in June: A volunteer at the Chicken Alley Thrift Shop in Vineyard Haven reported that “a leashed dog charged at me . . . and bit me on my right thigh,” according to a complaint filed with the police.

Cohen starts by admitting fault — a vital requirement, he tells me later. “Cumulatively, [four] bites are serious, and each one was certainly serious to the person who got bit,” he says. Then he makes a point about animal behavior, something else he always stresses. In each incident, Scooby bit only once, as if to say, “Keep away.” It’s a typical behavior when a dog feels threatened and is trying to send a message. “But,” he acknowledges, “we can’t have dogs sending messages that way.”

Next, he shifts the blame to the owners, Vineyard residents Peter and Nancy Stam. They’ve allowed Scooby to become too dominant, he argues, too ready to bite when startled or he thinks that he’s protecting them when people come near. He’s not evil, just over-reactive.

Cohen promises that the owners will make Scooby safe. They’ve already acquired a muzzle, and never take him out in public without it. They never let him off-leash anymore. Most importantly, they’ve signed him up for two months of owner-and-dog classes with Rick Alto, a trainer in Brewster who formerly served with the Secret Service. Once a week they’ll make the two-hour journey — by ferry and car — to Brewster, where Scooby will learn how to be less reactive.

“My mission is to make the Stams better owners tomorrow than they are today,” Cohen concludes. “Through equipment changes and behavioral changes, [Scooby] won’t be able to do this again.”

The board seems impressed. As the meeting continues, the director of Chicken Alley says she never wants to see the dog in her store again. Cohen agrees and takes it a step further: Scooby will never go into any store on the Vineyard again, except for grooming businesses and veterinary offices. Maciel says that two months of training won’t be enough. Again, Cohen and his clients relent: They’ll commit to six months of training, and then meet again with the Select Board so members can assess the dog’s behavior. In the end, the board votes to declare Scooby a “nuisance dog” rather than a dangerous one.

“We’re lucky,” Cohen tells me after the hearing. “Four bites to four people? In many other cities and towns that would have been a death sentence.”

COHEN’S WORKSPACE IN SALEM looks like any other lawyer’s office — big wooden desk, oversized chair, legal books lining shelves — but with a few differences. There’s a big picture frame on the wall with a collection of photos of past canine clients — Niko, Roxie, Stella, Bronson, Nietzsche, and of course Jesse.

“He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog,” reads a caption under the photos. “You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion.”

There’s a small maple box on a shelf with a brass plaque: Jesse’s ashes.

Growing up in Revere, Cohen never wanted to be a lawyer but felt pressured by the example of his father, who he describes as a hard-working and successful attorney. He rebelled, slogging through Suffolk Law and spending the year after graduation working at Kelly’s Roast Beef.

His first law job felt uninspiring — working in the insurance department of General Electric. Later, he found himself running a firm focused on debt collection, but, finding the work to be dreary, he lost direction and confidence. “I always wanted to make a difference, but I never saw a pathway to do that,” he says.

But then he found Jesse’s case, and a luminous pathway opened before him. There were hundreds of cases out there like Jesse’s, maybe thousands, and he now felt qualified to defend them. “And boy,” he recalls, “that just lit a fire and made me want to work, day and night.”

Cohen opens a spreadsheet on the computer monitor that dominates his desk. It’s a list of every call he’s received since getting into the business — more than 5,000 in all, with about 20 percent of the callers becoming clients.

Jesse, of course, was case number one. That’s when Cohen learned that a dog’s death sentence could be negotiated, as long as he took a reasonable position that protected the public as well as the dog.

Midnight was case number 14. The black, wolfish dog was ordered out of town by the Framingham Police Department after biting the chest of the boy next door who came over to pet him. The owner feared the dog might eventually be sentenced to death. Cohen spoke with people in the neighborhood and consulted with an animal behaviorist. He learned that prior to the bite, the boy and his friends would throw rocks at Midnight on their way home from school. “The dog remembers . . . so she bit him,” he explained. Midnight was spared. That was the first time Cohen had consulted a behaviorist to get the dog’s point of view. He thought, Whoa, this stuff works!

Case number 2,096: Ollie, a 5-month-old labradoodle, was mauled in 2020 by other dogs at a doggy day care center. That day, Amy Baxter rushed to Pampered Pets in East Longmeadow, where she had left Ollie less than two hours earlier, to find him bleeding from more than 100 puncture wounds. She took him to the hospital, where he lingered for seven weeks before dying.

When Baxter asked how the business ever got a license, she learned that Massachusetts has no regulations regarding kennels or other boarding facilities. A former government worker, she founded a coalition to spearhead a law requiring safety and performance standards for all pet-care facilities. She recruited Cohen to be a member of the legal team. He took on the job, winning Baxter a settlement for her loss, helping to put Pampered Pets out of business, and bringing real-world data to the coalition’s effort. “I realized that I could operate on a bigger scale than my day-to-day lawsuits by bringing some weight to this type of movement,” Cohen says.

Their effort, “An Act to Increase Kennel Safety, aka Ollie’s Law,” is pending in the state Legislature.

“Jeremy was invaluable in so many ways,” Baxter says. “I think we kind of inspired each other.”

THERE’S A BLACK CRYSTAL ORB on a shelf in Cohen’s office, about the size of a tennis ball. It’s a gift from Lorelei, the “Love Witch” of Salem — a.k.a. Laurie Stathopoulos, owner of the city’s oldest witch shop, Crow Haven Corner.

She heads a group called Salem Saves Animals, in memory of the animals that were executed during the infamous Witch Trials. Last autumn, she contacted Cohen in the hopes he could save a pit bull named Buster Brown.

Buster was on a Martha’s Vineyard ferry last August, when he got loose and attacked Lady, a little white puffball, who died several days later. Having learned that the culprit lived in Salem, Lady’s owner persuaded the police chief to seek to euthanize Buster. That’s when his owner, a sometimes homeless man, asked Stathopoulos for help.

Stathopoulos knew Buster and the man from the streets. She knew that while Buster had bitten other dogs, he never bothered people. She also knew that the problem wasn’t Buster but his owner, who ignored instructions to muzzle the dog and keep him on a leash.

“The city was pretty much backed up against a wall,” she says. “I mean, here’s a dog that has bitten others a few times and now they have a tourist whose dog ends up dying.”

She reached out to Cohen. Months of legal arguments followed, to no avail.

In January, Cohen brought in James Crosby, a nationally recognized dog behavior expert, who accompanied Stathopoulos to the kennel where Buster was confined.

Crosby watched Buster closely as he approached him, walked back and forth in front of the dog — slowly, then quickly — and came close enough for Buster to sniff him. He made sudden moves to “ramp up” the dog and saw how long it took to ramp him back down. “Eventually, I put hands on him, opened his mouth, messed with his feet, pulled on his tail.” Crosby found that even when he got Buster excited it was easy to settle him. His conclusion: “Buster was quite friendly — a little bit excitable, a little bit headstrong, but nothing that deserves to be declared dangerous.” All Buster needed was a responsible owner and consistent training.

Cohen went back to the court, but just before the trial, he and the city came to an agreement: Buster could live, provided he move in with a responsible owner, stay muzzled and leashed whenever in public, and trained to be less reactive to small dogs. He now resides with a new owner at an undisclosed location.

“My goodness, he was a life saver,” Stathopoulos says of Cohen. She gave him the crystal ball and blessed it. If any creature in Salem gets in trouble, she says, “We know that he’s the guy who’s ready to help us.”

YOU LOVE YOUR PET and may think it loves you — OK, you know it loves you — but in the eyes of the law, it’s just a piece of property, with no more intrinsic value than your TV. It’s not quite the same as a TV, because abusing or neglecting your pet is a criminal offense. But in terms of civil law — say, suing someone whose Rottweiler mauled your Chihuahua in the dog park — well, in that case, your dog is just property.

That’s a problem if you’re a pet owner suing for damages. If your Chihuahua got killed by that Rottweiler, you’re limited to the market value of a replacement Chihuahua. Some lawyers even argue that your Chihuahua depreciates as it grows older.

“You can’t crash a 1992 Honda and ask for a 2002 Honda to replace it,” an opponent of Cohen’s recently argued.

Cohen argued back: “It’s not a question of the depreciated value of a replacement dog, but the value of this particular dog.” The bond between an owner and her pet can never be replaced. What the court can do, however, is take a page from the insurance industry and itemize the costs his client incurred in creating that bond. So, in that case, Cohen totaled up the costs of the dog’s first year with his client, including purchase price, vaccination, veterinary care, equipment, food, and obedience training. It didn’t account for the dog’s pain and suffering, or the owner’s grief, but at more than $7,500 it was much higher than simple replacement cost. He won.

Things get trickier in custody disputes. When a couple breaks up, who gets the dog?

Probate and family courts are typically maxed out with difficult and unpleasant matters involving children. They’d never want to add pets to the mix. It’s up to district and superior courts to decide who gets the property. That means dividing assets, which you can’t do with a dog, or having one partner buy out the other, something that most pet owners won’t agree to.

For that reason, Cohen advises couples to settle. One couple who couldn’t is a pair of Boston-area thirtysomethings named Brett Lyman and Sasha Lanser. For a few months after their breakup, they shared custody of Teddy, their black Pomeranian. They had been passing the dog back and forth fairly regularly until Lanser, believing it was best for the dog, refused to give Teddy back and broke off all communication.

Lyman missed Teddy terribly, and after a year without the dog, he hired Cohen. The case dragged on for more than two and a half years. Cohen argued that although the dog was property in the eyes of the law, “It’s a special kind of property,” with a powerful bond to both owners. “Just because the relationship with each other ended doesn’t mean their relationships with Teddy should end.”

Cohen argued that because each person’s bond with Teddy was unique, normal property settlements couldn’t work. The only fair solution was joint custody — although he steered clear of that term because “custody” refers specifically to children. Any other arrangement would cause either party irreparable harm. Finally in March, the Massachusetts Appellate Court decided in his favor. Lyman and Lanser returned to their regular sharing of Teddy.

The case set a precedent. “This is huge,” says Debra Vey Voda-Hamilton, an attorney who practices pet law and mediation in New York and North Carolina. “Before this case, no judge that I’ve been aware of required people to share a pet.” It’s now legal precedent in Massachusetts to recognize the uniqueness of a pet owner’s bond with his or her pet — a clear step forward as seeing pets as more than mere property.

“We’re changing the law, in baby steps,” Cohen says.

It’s nice to set a precedent, but at what cost? Lyman told me he spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on the case.

That’s something I could not get my head around. All that expense for a little black puffball? When I separately pressed Lyman and Lanser on the issue, they both gave similar responses: Teddy’s my best friend. I owe it to Teddy. He’s always there for me in good times and bad.

I still didn’t get it, and turned to Cohen for an explanation. He talked about the 10,000-year bond between humans and canines and the debt we owe them for domestication. I didn’t see how that applied to Sasha Lanser and Brett Lyman. He talked about the human desire to nurture and how a little dog like Teddy was a perfect recipient. He talked about the unconditional love you get from your dog (or, maybe, your cat).

“They don’t judge you,” he said. “We’re judged everywhere, but there’s no judging with pets. "

Maybe that’s it, at least for Jeremy Cohen. He’s spent so many years feeling judged, by his father’s expectations and by other lawyers in court. “I had zero confidence, and it wasn’t any fun.” But then Jesse came along, and hundreds of other cases that followed. Now he’s taken seriously in court and other lawyers ask his advice.

“I had such great dreams when I was younger, and I lost that for so many years. And then I found my voice, and it amazes me every day. Now I have confidence. And I think that when I die, I’ll have left a legacy,” he says. “I’ll know that I did something.”

Douglas Starr, Professor Emeritus of Science Journalism at Boston University, often writes about science and the justice system. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

Correction: Due to reporting errors, an earlier version of this story included incorrect information about a dog-bite case in Framingham. The bite was to the boy’s chest, and police ordered the dog be relocated outside of town. The Globe regrets the errors.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5607388&forum_id=2...id#48169408)

a step up or down?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5607388&forum_id=2...id#48169432)