Mark Levison, The Levison Group
Some things stay with you. Sometimes it happens when you win a big case, and sometimes when you write a good column. Sometimes it happens when you get a dog. Jomo was my favorite. Below is an excerpt from what I once wrote about the tallest dog most people had ever seen.
One Friday my wife put her arm around me and said, “Honey, why don’t we take a nice ride into the country tomorrow and have a little picnic?” Cheryl’s not really the country type, so rather than taking the bait, I just said, “Sure.” After a long silence, she gave me a big smile and said, “I found this Great Dane that was used for breeding. It has lived outside all of its life, and because it has had its last litter, the breeders want to give it away. It has had a terrible life and we could make its last year or two better…”
Because I had been told it’s always best to say yes to the woman you’re involved with, I smiled and agreed, even though I was not truly enthusiastic about adding a miniature pony to my wife’s burgeoning [canine] collection. I did, however, question the cost of feeding a Great Dane. Cheryl explained to me that she knew how to buy cheap food, in bulk, and it really would cost “almost nothing.”
As it turned out, this dog wasn’t just “in the country”; its domicile was a five-hour drive away. About three and a half hours into the excursion, Cheryl received a call. Her demeanor blackened and she turned very angry. Eventually she hung up, turned to me and said, “They killed my dog.” I asked what that meant. She explained the dog had just been run over. I said, “Honey, be calm. It wasn’t your dog; you’ve never seen that dog.” She gritted her teeth and yelled…it went on like that for a while. (In keeping with proper spousal etiquette, I agreed, it was her dog.)
She then explained the breeders had an even older female Dane they would be “willing” to give to us, but she didn’t know if she wanted to deal with “dog killers.” I suggested that because we already had traveled about four hours, we might as well drive the rest of the way and at least look.
The breeder’s house was in the middle of farmland. It was hard to imagine any dog being hit by a car anywhere within 30 miles. Maybe it got run over by a combine! At any rate, we spotted the replacement giveaway in the yard. The poor dog looked like she came out of a National Geographic pictorial of Ethiopia during the famine. We mulled over the prospect of adopting a dog that only had a 50/50 chance of surviving the five-hour ride without an IV drip. We were trying to talk ourselves into “rescuing” it when somebody mentioned the puppies from the mother that had “just been run over.” All of a sudden, out romped two sister/brother tiny brindle-colored, cuddly puppies. Since Cheryl’s birthday was coming up, this was a game changer. I bought her the male. At the time it seemed like a minor problem that he had stitches from a hernia at birth. He looked like a cross between an African wild dog and a tiger, so we named him Jomo Serengeti Kenyatta as a tribute to Kenya’s first post-independence president.
No sooner had we put Jomo in the back of our car than he started to grow — over a pound a day. Jomo grew so fast that he kept busting out the stitches of his repeated hernia operations (I paid for four more, including driving him to the veterinary hospital at the state university where he had an intricate, and expensive, three-part operation). Within one year, Jomo had grown taller than any dog I’d ever seen. When he stands on his hind legs, he is close to 7 feet. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the gargantuan canine has a weak stomach. Jomo can only eat prescription dog food. It’s very expensive. If he gets near anything else, the results coming out of either end of him are voluminous and unfriendly. And, of course, he outgrew our largest vehicle in a matter of days. We had to buy an SUV (known as the “Jomobile”). Cheryl’s inexpensive dog had gotten extraordinarily expensive, but things got much worse.
Being a young dog, Jomo constantly wanted to play with a Schnauzer that lived with us as well. Her name was Little Dog. However, because Jomo’s head is bigger than the whole sum of Little Dog, Cheryl decided he was making Little Dog’s life miserable. Her conclusion was “we” needed another Great Dane to occupy Jomo’s time. (I don’t think she was thinking about “our time” when she reached that conclusion.)
Lola, a Merlequin Dane (a cross between a Harlequin and Blue Merle) is breathtakingly beautiful, and eats even more furniture than Jomo. Together they absolutely terrorize Little Dog, whose life, I’m convinced, is worse now than ever — and I can clearly relate to that.
Turning to the law, the importance of this column is the vivid illustration of the legal theory of cause and effect. This concept, which is so familiar to law students, teaches that one bad act — in this case, the baiting of dog rescuers, and the switching of them to an extraordinarily expensive puppy that rapidly transformed itself into the Incredible Canine Hulk — can result in compensable damages. Those damages were foreseeable, continue to accumulate, and as far as I’m concerned, the wrongdoers must be punished for their crime.
The foreseeable consequences have been little sleep, grumpiness at work, fighting with my secretary, and an obvious compounding of my damages. The purpose behind writing this column is to find a clever lawyer to take my case and sue the original scheming dog sellers for the chain of events that has befallen me since. The damages, of course, mount daily, and oh, by the way, once Cheryl brought Lola home…we had to buy a bigger SUV.
It’s been years since I first wrote about Jomo. What wasn’t foreseeable was that Jomo would grow so large that it would put stress on his joints and body. He died at a young age. We still have the Great Dane Lola, along with two other dogs my loving wife picked up off the street as the years have gone by.
Six months after Jomo’s passing, we were in a bar with a bunch of lawyers celebrating my birthday, and Cheryl began reading what seemed like an apocryphal tale about the passing of a king. It was about Jomo and his successor. By the end of the fable, I realized she had bought a brindle-colored Great Dane puppy to replace my loss. I wasn’t certain we were ready for yet another dog, but as I really missed Jomo, I appreciated her thoughtfulness. She told me the newcomer’s name was Scotch.
It wasn’t until a couple weeks later that she said, “Oh, did I forget to tell you that Scotch has a brother named Finnegan who is coming home with us too?” She added that she decided the brothers should have Irish names. I wasn’t quite sure “Scotch” was an Irish name, but I let that one pass. I did, however, call upon my skills — so well-honed day after day as an advocate of reasonable causes — to persuade her that two more Great Danes were, in fact, not reasonable. Of course, I utterly failed.
She explained that since the brothers would occupy themselves, they would be much less work than having only one Great Dane puppy. This time, the drive was ten hours to farm land south of Cleveland. When we got them they weighed eight and ten pounds. About two weeks later they weigh nineteen and twenty pounds. Her belief, that having two puppies instead of one would make it easier, has proved analogous to the theory that having identical twins is easier, than having only one child.
Since I’ve been preparing for trial ever since we got the Dane duo, I haven’t been able to spend much time with them. When I am around, they are glad to see me. In fact, when I arrived home last night, I bent down to give them a kiss, and in their enthusiasm one of their teeth caught my face and sliced it from my nose to my lip. When I go to trial in a couple of days I will have a nice reminder of the dogs right there in front of me — just another case of foreseeable damages.
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Under Analysis is a nationally syndicated column. Mark Levison is a member of the law firm Lashly & Baer. You can reach the Levison Group in care of this paper or by e-mail at comments@levisongroup.com.
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