Pets & People

The Law Says Your Cat Is Furniture. This Judge Said Otherwise.

A New York judge just handed a woman full custody of the cat her friend refused to give back. The interesting part isn't the drama. It's that the law that should have applied to a pet's welfare didn't cover this case at all.

By Jordan Ellis, Certified Dog Trainer

July 25, 2025 · 6 min read

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We have gotten used to the idea that pets get custody arrangements. Couples split, and somewhere in the negotiation, the dog gets a schedule. It is no longer strange.

What happened in a Manhattan courtroom on July 11, 2025 is stranger, and more legally interesting than the tabloid version suggests. Two women fought for two years over a cat. They were never married. They were never partners. They were friends, which means the one law in New York built to protect a pet’s wellbeing in a breakup did not apply to them at all.

The judge went there anyway.

What happened

Aliya Zaydullina, a New Yorker now based in Florida, adopted a cat named Liza from a shelter in 2013 for $60. In 2022, she asked her friend Maria Senichkina to look after Liza while she traveled to Russia to see her sick mother.

The stay was supposed to be short. It became seven months.

The two women tell that stretch of time very differently, and the difference is the whole case. Zaydullina says she asked to extend the pet-sitting arrangement and never at any point agreed to give her cat away. Senichkina understood it otherwise: that agreeing to keep Liza that long meant Liza was now hers. She told Gothamist she would never have signed up to be a temporary sitter for seven months, pointing to the hundreds of dollars and the hours she put in, veterinary bills among them.

Two years of litigation later, Manhattan Civil Court Judge Wendy Li ruled for Zaydullina. She found that Zaydullina had not abandoned the cat and had remained Liza’s legal owner the entire time. Zaydullina must reimburse Senichkina for Liza’s care over the agreed-upon sitting window, September 2022 to May 2023. Senichkina has said she hopes to appeal, and as of the ruling, Liza was not yet back home.

The line that makes this case matter

Buried in the ruling is the reasoning, and it is not a property analysis.

Judge Li wrote that the bond between Senichkina and the cat over two and a half years was not in doubt, and then set it against the decade Zaydullina had already spent with Liza before any of this started, a bond she found to be at least as strong. She weighed the cat’s wellbeing. And then she did something courts almost never do with an object: she recommended the two women work out an arrangement so that Senichkina could remain part of Liza’s life, in the manner of divorced parents.

An animal law expert told Gothamist that this kind of welfare reasoning is rare. Here is why it’s rare, and why most owners have no idea how exposed they are.

The law that didn’t apply

In October 2021, New York amended its Domestic Relations Law, adding a fifteenth factor to the list courts weigh under DRL § 236(B)(5)(d). It requires a court awarding possession of a companion animal to consider the animal’s best interests. Before that, a dog or cat was straightforwardly personal property, divided in a divorce the way you’d divide a sofa or a car. Senator James Skoufis and Assemblymember Deborah Glick introduced the bill precisely because courts were reaching wildly inconsistent results.

It was a real advance. It is also, crucially, a divorce statute.

Zaydullina and Senichkina were not spouses. They weren’t separating. Their fight was, in legal terms, an ordinary property dispute between two people over a chattel, and the “best interests” factor sitting in the family law code had nothing to say about it. In that lane, the standard question is not “what does the cat need?” It is “who owns the cat?”

Which means Judge Li’s welfare reasoning wasn’t required of her. She reached for it.

That is the actual news here, and it cuts both ways. A judge choosing to consider a cat’s wellbeing in a property case is a genuine signal about where the courts are drifting. It is also, by definition, a choice, and the next judge on the next case is free not to make it. New York’s own statute doesn’t define what a pet’s “best interests” even are, leaving courts to build the framework case by case. Outside of a divorce, there’s barely a framework at all.

What this means if you have a pet and a friend

Almost nobody papers a pet-sitting arrangement. It feels absurd, faintly insulting, to hand a friend a document because they offered to feed your cat.

This case is the argument for doing it anyway, and it takes about four sentences:

Put the end date in writing. A text message counts. “Thank you so much for taking Liza from September to May” is a record, and it is the exact fact these two women spent two years disputing.
Say explicitly that ownership isn’t transferring. The entire dispute turned on one person believing a long stay had quietly become an adoption. One line prevents that.
Handle the money out loud. Senichkina’s strongest argument was the cost and the labor she absorbed, and Zaydullina was ordered to reimburse her for it. Agree in advance who pays for food, litter, and vet bills, and settle up as you go.
Keep your paperwork. Adoption records, microchip registration in your name, vet invoices, license. In a property case, ownership evidence is what the court is actually looking at.
If the stay stretches, re-confirm it. The seven-month extension is where this went wrong. Every extension is a new agreement, and it should look like one.

None of this is cynical. It’s the same logic as writing down which of you owns the couch before you move in together. Doing it while everyone is fond of each other is the cheap version. Doing it after is a two-year lawsuit.

The uncomfortable middle

There’s a temptation to pick a villain, and the ruling declines to. Judge Li’s language is careful about that: two people, both attached, both with a real claim on a cat’s affection, and no clean way to give an animal to both of them.

The court’s answer was to award the cat to the person who had her first and longest, and then to gently suggest they figure out the rest like grown-ups. Zaydullina says she’s open to rebuilding the connection if trust and communication can be rebuilt first. Senichkina wants to appeal.

Liza, for her part, has been in the middle of this for three years, which is a meaningful fraction of a cat’s life, and is the one party to the dispute whose preferences nobody can actually ask.