Utah Dog Bite Law

In the State of Utah, the laws are set up to make a full recovery for a dog bite victim as close to a sure thing as possible. A tort is a civil wrong. When someone has harmed you, and you wish to recover money damages from them to help pay for your injuries, the tort system is what helps you out. There are many wrongs that can be righted with a civil claim. To get a judge to render a judgment that forces the wrongdoer to pay you your money, there are certain things that you must be able to show. If someone’s dog bites you and you suffer an injury, Utah allows three different paths to recovery.

The first is to bring a claim of an intentional tort. This is extremely rare because this claim requires showing that the dog owner intended to have his or her dog attack you. If you were walking down the street, and your neighbor, who does not like you, let his dogs of the leash, pointed at you and yelled, “sick em’!” That would be an intentional tort. When that happens, an injured plaintiff can even recover punitive damages. To reiterate, these cases are extremely rare in Dog Bite cases in Utah.

The second path to recovery would be the standard negligence route. In some states, this is a common route. In Utah, it is not. In order to recover under this legal theory, a person who was bitten by a dog would have to show that the dog owner fell below a standard of reasonable care. In other words, that dog owner was not as careful in preventing a dog bite as a normal dog owner should be. Many states use the “one bite rule” to clarify this. The one bite rule gives each dog a free bite out of a human. That law says that a dog owner is only responsible to pay for injuries caused by his or her dog if the owner already had reason to believe that their dog was dangerous. The exception to this one bite rule would be if you could establish a case for negligence per se. Negligence per se says that the dog owner broke the law, so he or she is automatically negligent. This would apply in a situation where a dog was trespassing, or where the owner had broken a leash law.

Letting every dog have one free crack at a human being seems like a silly rule to me. Luckily, the State of Utah agrees with me. That is why Utah has enacted a third path to liability through state statute. This third route is called scienter, or strict liability. Strict liability means that if your dog bites someone, we don’t need to ask questions, you are automatically responsible for the injuries caused by your dogs. Strict liability is commonly applied to any unusually dangerous activities and any situations involving animals, even when the particular animal may not be dangerous. The reason for this is that the law seeks to incentivize those who own animals to take adequate precaution so that their animals do not cause harm to any other people or to anyone else’s property.

Strict liability is the law in Utah and for that reason it is the path that is nearly always taken by injured dog bite victims. Dogs can make great pets and can be man’s best friend, but when an angry dog attacks a human being; the owner of the dog must be ready to pay for the medical treatment necessary to provide the victim with a full recovery. If you have questions about dog bite law in Utah, call an experienced Utah dog bite lawyer today.