Bipartisan bill H.R. 1258-- the "Pets And Women Safety Act of 2015"-- was assigned to committee on March 4. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/114/hr1258/text

The 'PAWS Act' [awwww… cute!!!!1!!] would increase federal "pet shelter" and "emergency housing" funding by $3,000,000 every year from 2016 to 2020, by funding "eligible entities" [such as Women's Shelters] as bound by VAWA, the Violence Against Women Act. Oversight would be accountable to the Office on Violence Against Women of the Department of Justice.

The bill's co-sponsor, Katherine Clark (D-MA) specifies women-- and only women-- as victims of domestic violence, in her official press release: "Sadly, domestic violence is something one in every four women will experience at some point in their lives." http://katherineclark.house.gov/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=3E45617D-6A93-4CD7-8051-D51DAB07DA16

"In this country, too many women are going to experience domestic violence," Clark told her local Waltham News Tribune. "A woman is abused every nine seconds and sometimes, in this heartbreaking situation, they find it is made worse by the fear for their animals who often become a tool for manipulation." http://waltham.wickedlocal.com/article/20140819/News/140816888

Supporters, such as the ASPCA, are likewise unabashed in portraying victimhood as occurring only to women, children, and pets; but never men. And the existence of female perpetrators is studiously unmentioned: https://www.aspca.org/fight-cruelty/report-animal-cruelty/domestic-violence-and-animal-cruelty

News outlets such as CBS also conflate 'victims' with women, never specifying women as perpetrators: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2015/03/06/federal-bill-would-protect-pets-of-domestic-abuse-victims/

The danger inherent in blatantly assuming men to be "stalkers" and "domestic abusers"/ combined with presumption of unilateral female innocent-victimhood-- is that even gender-neutral wording will be enforced in a gender-specific way. (In-addition to the explicitly non-gender-neutral provisions of VAWA.)

Of particular concern is "Section 2" of the PAWS bill, which would expand the wording of definitions in federal "Stalking" and "Domestic Violence" law to include pets. Biased enforcement would recreate the familiar double-standard of a father fleeing a child-abusing mother with their child--and finding himself homeless & subject to an Amber Alert for kidnapping/ while a mother fleeing a child-abusing father is provided with hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded shelters, police protection, an assigned social caseworker, and targeted funding bonuses to courts which prosecute on her behalf, all mandated by the Violence Against Women Act.

Just as false claims of child abuse are often used by unscrupulous divorce lawyers to obtain advantage in child custody cases; the PAWS Act creates a moral hazard-- a means and motive to win pet custody in contested-cases by playing on sexist biases.

It is certainly-not fanciful to imagine that those who use "man" interchangeably with "stalker" and "abuser" would also automatically brand any man-- who takes his own pet with him in an equitable, non-violent breakup--as a "stalker" and "domestic abuser"-- regardless of whether he was ever a stalker or abuser prior to being defined as such by the PAWS Act's chicken-or-the-egg feminist-logic.