Defending the Underdog

If the defendant has wings, fins, fur, tails, scales, paws or claws, there’s a good chance its attorney is Michael Rotsten of Encino.

Perhaps the only lawyer in Southern California with an almost exclusively animal clientele, Rotsten says he deals with elephant- sized problems as well as little barks and bites.

And then there are the various oddball occurrences you would never think of until they happen to your animals or to you. Like the woman wearing a clown suit who was hit by a cow. And the pet shop owner charged with illegal possession of freshwater stingrays.

Next month, Rotsten will go to court in Orange County to conclude what has turned out to be a more serious case. It involves an injured 8-year-old Yorba Linda boy and a 4-year-old bull mastiff named Boo.

No one disputes that Boo caused Zachary Anderson Jr., a neighbor, to require multiple stitches after the child entered Boo’s dog yard and was “pinned” by the 140-pound pooch.

“But the evidence doesn’t substantiate the allegation that the child was bitten,” Rotsten says. “It indicates the child sustained injuries from the claws on the dog’s paws, and that it was the dog’s weight and size that caused him to do damage.”

He adds: “It is awful that it happened.”

Rotsten, 54, says he loves kids, is a father and grandfather himself. But should Boo’s crime be a hanging offense?

“No way,” Rotsten says. And, after Orange County Animal Control tried twice to kill the dog, he went to court to prove that Boo is no killer himself.

“Expert witnesses testified that a dog of that size and power was not trying to kill the child. If he’d wanted to, boom, the child would be dead. The dog pinned the boy, who came into his territory at night and he did what a bull mastiff is born to do. It was totally explainable.”

The judge apparently agreed. It was decided that Boo will not be put to death; that, in fact the Orange County Animal Control decision to kill the dog was “not based on the evidence and was clearly an abuse of discretion.”

On the other hand, it also determined that Boo was “vicious under law,” because he had caused substantial damage to the child.

Boo’s owner, Stephen Williams, a CPA who hired Rotsten and has so far spent $10,000 on the case, says his next goal is to get his family pet out of the cage in which he has languished for nine months.

In October, a judge will determine under what conditions the animal can be set free.

The case has brought Rotsten international attention. Calls and e-mail from Europe and around the U.S. request his advice on animal matters, or simply congratulate him for choosing nonhuman clients.

Don’t confuse his specialty with animal rights, he is quick to tell you, “because animal rights generally involve large, socially oriented and generic issues such as product testing on animals and environmental problems” affecting creatures great and small. Those issues, Rotsten says, he works on occasionally and usually pro bono.

But the bread-and-butter of his practice tends to be the “everyday problems and disputes” related to animals. Some tend to be a bit more . . . unusual. Like the clown versus cow case. (He represented the clown.)

“There she was, in costume, directing traffic into an open house that was for sale. A cow was meandering down the street, on the loose. It swung its head at her, threw her down so that she tweaked her back and hurt her jaw.”

It turned out, Rotsten says, that the cow’s owner had been cited weekly for more than a year for escaping cows. “We wound up settling the case out of court because they finally saw I was crazy enough to try it in court. My reputation is that I’m aggressive and I’ll try anything. They can’t scare me off.”

Then there was the great stingray sting. His client “had an aquarium store, and about 17 of these freshwater fish. California Fish and Game seized them and charged him with illegal possession of a prohibited species. But we prevailed,” Rotsten says in his bland, low-key manner.

The case was thrown out of court, and his client released, he says, when Rotsten proved that stingrays had never been officially designated a prohibited species by the Legislature--even though Fish and Game had requested such a designation. His client never got the stingrays back, however.

“The offensive part is that Fish and Game raided my client’s store, threw the fish into a sack where they died on the spot, and loaded them into an evidence freezer.”

He also does a fair number of pet warranty cases, where people buy an animal from a shop or breeder, then find it is desperately ill. Rotsten considers himself a defense lawyer and rarely takes cases to prosecute an animal. When he does, it’s because he believes the animal has bitten or hurt someone as a result of being improperly cared for by its owner.

“I’ll take the case to hopefully prove to an owner that he has to be more responsible and treat his pet better.”

He never takes cases in which a person requests the destruction of an offending animal. “Because no matter what happened, it is almost always the owner’s fault, not the animal’s.”

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Animal law is not as lucrative as financial, real estate or other legal specialties, Rotsten says. But neither is it as corporate, which suits him just fine. His one-room office in a bank building on Ventura Boulevard in Encino is filled with dogeared files. On non-court days he works there in his favorite faded sport shirts and chinos. On court days, he suits up appropriately, but can’t wait to get the “formal clothes” off his back, he says.

He refers to his animal clients much as he would talk about people. As in, “We got Sinbad out, but now we’ve got to get Boo.”

Sinbad is an Alaskan malamute who lived happily in an El Segundo yard until a neighbor accidentally drove through the fence and set Sinbad free. A lengthy court case ensued, because Sinbad ran around confused all day and eventually nipped the finger of someone who tried to catch him by holding his collar while shining a flashlight in his eyes. The man claimed major injuries, the medical establishment disagreed, and Sinbad and his owner were happily reunited after running up fairly hefty (for her) legal fees.

Rotsten, who practiced criminal law for more than 20 years, until about 1990, says his people cases had become “a little bit boring to me, and the nature of my practice had changed. I still loved it, but I was tired of it too.”

He was casting about for new challenges when he noticed a committee was being formed within the bar association to help protect animal rights. “I’ve always been into animals. As a kid growing up in the Fairfax District, I nursed all the ailing animals of the neighborhood. I wanted to be a veterinarian.”

After working on the Venice Canal duck case and a few others, he says he realized that none of his colleagues on the committee had practices restricted to animals. It was a niche that hadn’t been filled.

“It sounded crazy. But then I took a course that was similar to est, and I decided to envision such a practice, and see if I could make it come true.”

The more he practices, the more true it gets. There are the oddball cases, like the people in Orange County who found a dog that wasn’t theirs and wouldn’t give it back. Rotsten was hired; he asked the family nicely. No way, they said; how do we know he’s really their dog? He tried again and again. Finally, he said the family could keep the dog, but they would have to promise that when the symptoms of the dog’s severe liver disease started showing, they would take him to the vet regularly.

The family was happy to give the dog back.

And then there was Norman the bull.

“My client helped birth this bull, in Riverside. She brings him up. And he’s getting too big to keep. But she loves him. So she interviews over 50 people to find one capable of adopting Norman. Finally she finds Jim, who meets all the criteria. She writes out a paper saying that if he can’t keep Norman for any reason, he will give Norman back to her. He will never mistreat Norman and will never slaughter him.”

So what happens?

“Norman gets too big, and Jim gives Norman to his father, who slaughters Norman.”

The heartbroken woman hired Rotsten, who sued the man who had signed the adoption papers. “He had no insurance,” Rotsten says, “so he had to pay cash out of his pocket. We settled for $5,000.” It’s not a lot, but it taught the guy a lesson.

And that’s no bull.