Birth rates are low. And younger people of childbearing age are opting to treat their pets like their children. So, it’s safe to assume that more Americans now than ever insist that their pets are full-fledged members of their family.
In fact, according to Pew Research, we definitely know that nearly all pet owners in the United States consider pets as part of their family. We might as well claim them as dependents on our taxes, right?
Well, the IRS vehemently disagrees. According to the tax code, dogs are property, like your couch or the old pair of rollerblades gathering dust in your closet. One woman is trying to change that.
A Woman Is Taking the IRS to Court Over Claiming Dogs as Dependents
As reported by Forbes, Amanda Reynolds is an attorney licensed in New York and Utah. She is using her legal background to sue the Internal Revenue Service and the Eastern District of New York, as she argues that Finnegan, her eight-year-old golden retriever, should be a dependent.
Excuse me. Finnegan’s only the dog’s first name. Its full name is Finnegan Mary Reynolds. Three human names for one dog. Reynolds argues that Finnegan meets every meaningful requirement of a legal dependent. Except for the one that the entire case will likely hinge on: being human.
He relies on Reynolds for food, shelter, medical care, transportation, and training. He has no income, lives full-time with her, and costs more than $5,000 a year. She argues that if this were a person, the IRS would already be calculating her tax credits.
She also argues that treating pets as mere property ignores the modern reality of pet ownership. They’re not just fuzzy home accoutrements. Pets are nowadays often considered to be fully-fledged members of the family, even if they aren’t so in the eyes of the law.
A lot of people spend as much on their dogs as they do on children. Some of the tax code doesn’t offer relief for that burden. Reynolds thanks the distinction between human and dog is arbitrary. Especially since the IRS already allows limited tax benefits for certain types of animals, like service dogs.
While it sounds like she’s technically arguing that there is no meaningful difference between a companion animal and a child, the actual argument she’s bringing to court is that there is no meaningful financial difference between a service animal and a companion animal.
She’s really going all out with this lawsuit. She’s using it to argue that the current system violates constitutional principles of equal protection and amounts to unfair taking, in essence arguing that the government is taxing pet owners more just because their dependents aren’t human.
She goes further: in the lawsuit, she suggests the dog deserves a kind of “quasi-citizenship” for tax purposes.
I admit, there is a cleverness to some of her arguments. Some of which have a degree of that kind of silly in-argueability you usually find in stupid standup comic logic. But whether or not any of it holds up in a court of law is something that is going to be tested soon.
It doesn’t seem like her case has much of a chance, but, you know—good luck with all that.
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