Pets trusts – the other side

Although there is a rapidly growing movement to recognize and enforce pet trusts in the United States, some writers from other nations think this trend is foolish and wasteful.
   

For example, see Christopher Caldwell, Philanthropy goes to the dogs, Financial Times, July 4, 2008:
   

So a vast amount of the productive energy of future generations has been pre-allocated to dogs on the say-so of one of the most disreputable public figures of postwar America [Leona Helmsley]. Maybe people born a quarter of a century from now will think this was a terrific idea. But if starvation and suffering are not abolished in the interim, they are just as likely to view Helmsley’s will as we view the emperor Caligula’s making a consul of his horse. They may think, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, that a large fortune is never more innocently employed than when it is being blown at the gambling tables by some feckless heir. * * *
   

Private property is the sine qua non of a free society. But it should not carry with it the capacity to harden the institutions of the next generation around the whims of this one.
   

Special thanks to Joel Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this article to my attention.