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MONTREAL — Chantal Dumais says her little two-and-a-half-year-old cat, Juliette, was like a member of her family.

So when the Montreal-area resident opened her door in June 2015 and saw her beloved pet’s inert body covered in blood, she called her employer in tears and asked to work from home that day.

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“I was so upset after seeing her dead, I wasn’t able to work that day, I was in too much pain,” she said in a phone interview.

But while Dumais considered her pet like family, her employer — and the law — did not see it that way.

A Quebec labour tribunal recently sided with Dumais’ former employer, ruling the medical clinic she worked for was within its rights to refuse her request to work from home that day.

“Nothing in the law allows a worker to be absent from work because of the death of a pet,” tribunal Judge Sylvain Allard wrote.

The decision came after Dumais filed a complaint against her former employer, alleging she was forced to leave her job due to various incidents of alleged psychological harassment that included derogatory comments and “excessive surveillance” on the part of her supervisor.