Addressing two separate, but similar lawsuits involving bicycle collisions caused by dogs, a divided New York Court of Appeals held that the dogs’ owners could not be sued for negligence based on the owners’ inadequate supervision of the animals. In Doerr v. Goldsmith and Dobinski v. Lockhart, Plaintiffs were injured when they collided with unleashed dogs while riding their bicycles. Relying on longstanding precedent, the Court determined that Plaintiffs could not bring negligence causes of action against the dogs’ owners, since the only basis for suit under the law was a theory of strict liability by showing an animal’s vicious propensities.
The well-established law of New York requires that the owner of a domestic animal must know or should have known of the animal’s vicious propensities in order to be held liable for any harm that animal causes. A “vicious propensity” is the “propensity to do any act that might endanger the safety of persons and property of others in a given situation.”
In the past, New York courts held that this “strict liability” standard of recovery for injuries caused by a domestic animal precluded any recovery under a theory of negligence. In 2013, an exception to this rule was carved out in Hastings v. Sauve, which held that a landowner or animal owner can be liable for negligence when a farm animal is negligently allowed to stray from the property on which the animal is kept.
Knowing that the strict liability theory of recovery would bar them from brining any negligence causes of action against the Defendants, Plaintiffs in Doerr and Dobinski both attempted to argue that the Hasting decision should be extended to cover domestic pets, so that the owners’ failure to properly restrain the dogs or confine them to their property would create negligence liability. Plaintiffs further argued that the Defendants’ affirmative negligent acts in using the dogs as instrumentalities of harm created liability arising out of the negligence of their owners for failing to directly control their animals.
The Court refused to extend Hastings to create liability for failing to properly constrain domestic animals. Noting that New York law requires farm animals to be raised in confinement, the Court found that owners of these animals have a duty to exercise reasonable care in keeping such exceptionally dangerous animals on the owners’ premises. No corresponding duty exists for a pet owner to exercise reasonable care in the control of a pet that has no known vicious propensity, so the owner’s failure to exercise such care does not furnish a basis for liability.
The Court also found Plaintiffs’ argument that the owners should be held negligent for their own negligence in directing and controlling the dogs to be unpersuasive. The Court recognized that there is no way to predict or control how a dog will interpret, react, or respond to an owner’s command or direction in its surroundings. The dogs’ volitional conduct ultimately creates the harm; the owners’ acts or omissions do not cause the injury. Therefore, the dog’s choice cannot result in negligence liability for the owner.
