Sitemaps

Can a court order you to sell your fish if you lose a lawsuit2007-11-24 23:10:25

Here's a good one.

Say you lose a lawsuit & the guy comes from the court to assess your assets to figure out what you they can sell / auction before garnishing wages, and one of your only assets is a big fish tank filled with living fish. Its retail cost was probably around that of a nice couch. Hypothetically could the court order the tank to be auctioned off, even though there are living pets in it or are there some sort of animal rights laws that you can invoke to protect your fishies?

Answers:

Pets are property. They have no rights themselves nor you to them beyond your property and, legally, are nothing more than, as you compared, equal to a couch. You can't argue that they can't sell your couch because you love it. If it can be determined that the fish have enough value worth selling and worth paying the debt, they can be sold. As long as the animals are not intentionally harmed during this process, it is not considered animal abuse.

---

I dunno, I wouldn't want to really find out either, or be on that end of a suit lol. I think you'd probably get a better answer in the legal section then here, because you could say whatever you wanted out fish, it still comes down to the judge and laws really, if you follow my meaning.

JV

---

There has been a case where a judge ordered a guy to have a dentist remove the diamonds in his teeth to satisfy a judgement.

---

Unfortunately, even though they are living creatures, pets are still considered owned assets, and fish are bought and sold for profit, so I think yes, you could be ordered to sell the fish.

After all, if the owner of a pet store was involved in such a lawsuit, he or she could not (and should not) be able to wriggle out of paying off the suit by claiming that the pets were living creatures and therefor exempt from being sold.