Are you emotionally distressed by your pet’s death? Console yourself. Law cannot help you much at the moment.

To pet owners, March was a month of agony. Hundreds lost their beloved pets due to food contamination. Thousands saw their pets suffer kidney failure, lethargy, vomiting, and other serious ailments. Many felt miserable when they realized that their pet’s death was caused by the food they cajoled them to eat with their own hands.

Agonized pet owners considered suing pet food manufacturers, but stopped when they received another jolting tidbit. The law does not recognize owners’ emotional bonds with their pets. In fact, the law is blind to a pet owner’s grief. Legally speaking, a pet is an owner’s personal property. The law will only compensate the owner with the retail price of the pet food. How cruel! How flawed!

Owners’ agony and our legal system’s limitations have made us think beyond our professional orbits. It has made us question our administration’s indolence and the legal community’s indifference. It also provides insight about the manufacturers’ negligence, the media’s duplicity, and society’s apathy.

Americans are known to have a strong attachment with their four-legged family members. Almost 70 million American homes house around 164.4 million cats and dogs. Hundreds of these pets died and thousands became seriously ill due to contaminated food. On March 31 alone, the number of pet deaths was 2,797.

It was early March when the mayhem began. Pet owners began panicking when there was a delay in information, the cause and the treatment of this problem. The chaos continued till mid-March. On March 16, Menu Foods, Inc., a leading pet food manufacturer initiated a voluntary recall for a large number of dog and cat food packets.

The recall was necessitated after conducting routine test trials and receiving several customer complaints. During the tests, some animals who consumed the product developed kidney failure. Some even died. This forced the company to go public and recall the food packets from shelves. The company has yet to address charges that it had previous knowledge about unsafe ingredients. Some also suspect that the company knew about the disease-causing constituent as early as December 2006.

Unluckily, the problem was not caused by one solitary company. Thousands of distress calls suggested poisoning of other brands, too. A few days later, other companies followed suit. Nestle, Del Monte, Hill’s, and P&G also recalled their brands.

Some anguished pet owners sued the food manufacturers. They are not complaining about the few hundred dollars doled out to vets to save their pets; they are grieving the loss of their life’s best companions. "I would love to find an attorney to take on this company," said Brenda Hitchcock of Tampa, Fla. Hitchcock who had spent $4,000 in veterinarian bills. She could not save her 5-year-old cat "S.S."

The general consensus is that pet owners may not get fair compensation if they individually sue pet food manufacturers. A class-action suit would be more rewarding.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, noted that, “with animals, all you get is the value of the property. There are no emotional damages.” However, another legal analyst argued that animals and humans are not like, thus the outcome of their cases will also be different.

Is there another legal remedy? Richard G. Nadler, a successful attorney with more than 30 years of trial and appellate experience, sees another legal perspective. To him, pet owners can demand damages for tort, product liability, or negligence. He asserts that compensation towards the loss of a pet can range from $3,000 to $990,000. Ordinary uniform commercial code can demand about $800 for the loss of a dog and a similar amount for veterinary care.

No doubt, a class action would be a superior legal recourse. Besides avoiding inconsistent decisions in different courts, it will also ensure a uniform method of compensation to all sufferers.

Last month’s tragedy was more than a system failure. It was also a challenge to the legal community. We should not forget that law is created from real life incidents. Continuous evolution is the only way to perfect law.