Can You Inspect a Dog in a Dog Bite Injury Case?

If you were in a car accident, you would expect that the vehicles in the accident would undergo some kind of inspection by both the victim, and the negligent defendant (as well as the insurance companies involved). If you were in a slip and fall, you would expect that the area where the person fell would undergo some type of review or inspection.

When products fail and cause injuries, the products are preserved so that they can be broken down and inspected, to see how they failed, and what caused the failure or the mechanism of injury.

So what about dog bite cases? When a dog bites someone, can the victim through his attorneys or experts, inspect the dog?

Legally, the answer is yes: there is no legal impediment to asking a court or judge to inspect the dog that caused the injury or the bite. But there are some practical considerations.

Using Dog Behavior Experts to Inspect

Experts in animal and dog behavior can often look at a dog that has injured someone, work with it, and over some time with the dog, give a thorough and mostly accurate analysis of the dog. The expert should be able to tell if the dog is excitable, nervous, anxious, prone to snapping or biting, and generally give all sides in the case a review of the dog’s tendencies and temperament. This should help determine what caused the dog to injure the victim.

You can expect challenges to your dog expert’s report however. Many people do not believe that dog experts actually use “science” or that they are trained experts at all, at least, not enough so to constitute admissible evidence in court.

Because a judge has to approve of expert testimony before a jury can hear it, and because evidence has to meet a certain scientific and research standard, before a jury hears it, dog behaviorists or dog experts opinions, must be defended by the victim, to show the judge that the expert’s opinions are based on solid experience, scientific foundation, and research.

Safety and Location of the Dog

There are other hurdles as well, the main one being the dog itself.

Of course, the dog has to be safe enough for anybody to get close enough to it to be examined. If the dog is being held in a government facility or is impounded, permission will have to be obtained from the appropriate government agency, to access the dog.

The location of the dog may matter as well; a dog that is impounded by the city may be more anxious, upset, or scared, then the dog would have been normally at home or wherever the dog was when it caused the injury. This can lead the expert’s review to be challenged as being inaccurate.

The expert should visit the scene itself, where the injury or bite happened, to see if there is anything about the surroundings that would have caused the dog to bite or cause injury.

Get the Inspection Quickly

Inspections should be done relatively quickly; as dogs get older, their personalities are prone to change, making the expert’s review less relevant to the case, the longer it takes to get the inspection.

Call our Boston personal injury lawyers at The Law Office of Joseph Linnehan, Jr. today at 617-275-4200 for help in your dog bite injury case.

Source:

watertown-ma.gov/222/Animal-Bites