An animal shelter that fails to warn someone who adopts a dog of the animal’s aggressiveness is not liable for injuries when the dog later attacks the owner if the shelter’s negligence was not the cause of those injuries.
Though the North Shore Animal League America neglected to warn the owner that the dog had previously bitten someone in the face, the animal’s displays of aggressive behavior in the first three months that the owner brought it home gave the owner sufficient knowledge of the dog’s vicious tendencies, a state appeals court in Brooklyn ruled in a decision dated Aug. 17.
The ruling overturned an order by a trial judge who permitted the lawsuit to proceed based on the owner’s claims of negligence and breach of warranty implied by the adoption agreement.
The parties agreed that after the owner adopted the dog on May 19, 2012, the dog acted aggressively, including growling when the owner attempted to feed it. Eight weeks later, the dog bit the owner’s hand when she tried to retrieve a cookie from the floor, about seven weeks before the dog allegedly bit her in the face.
The weeks between the first bite on July 13 and the attack that followed “gave the plaintiff sufficient knowledge of the dog’s vicious propensities before she was bitten again on September 3, 2012,” wrote four judges of the Appellate Division’s Second Department. “Similarly, once she knew of the dog’s vicious propensities, the plaintiff was in the best position to take precautionary measures to prevent harm to herself and others.”
While New York law has held for two centuries that the owner of a domestic animal who either knows or should have known of that animal’s vicious propensities will be liable for harm the animal causes as a result, in this case the owner’s becoming independently aware of the dog’s tendencies meant that the shelter’s alleged failure to advise the owner of them “was not a proximate cause of her injuries,” the court added.
According to the court, the trial judge should have dismissed both the claim of negligence against the owner and the contention that the owner violated a warranty that the dog was fit to be a pet. Even if the adoption of an animal from a shelter were a transaction to which a so-called warranty of merchantability applies, the owner failed to notify the shelter of the dog’s propensities within a reasonable time after she discovered or should have discovered them, the court ruled.