Pets or companion animals are the property of those who own them.'In this article, I shall show that pets that are the subject of disputes between divorcing spouses or separating unmarried couples should continue to be characterized as property under a rational legal system. Proposals in the law review literature2 and halting, early attempts by some courts to place pets in some category other than property, which flirted with a standard derived from the prevailing best-interest-of-the-child doctrine in conventional child custody and visitation cases, 3 are, at best, vanity. Such proposals do violence to both the language and the law of child custody, create uncertainty in a well-established area of divorce law, and offer no dis-* Sidney and Walter Siben Distinguished Professor of Family Law, Hofstra University. I am grateful to Usman Chaudhary and to Lisa Spar for invaluable research assistance in the preparation of this article; to Professors James F. Gesualdi, Joanna Grossman, Robert 1. Levy, and Cheryl L. Wade for their comments; and to my Hofstra colleagues who participate in a faculty workshop at which I presented an early version of this piece.