The Ethics of Pet Liability

This week I noticed an online story about a family whose dog had been hit by a car and killed, who were now being billed by the driver’s insurance company to recover the cost of repairs to the car. It seems like a completely cruel and heartless thing to do, doesn’t it? People have just lost a beloved member of the family, are still trying to cope with the loss, and then they get hit with a bill for the damage caused during the accident. Certainly, that’s how the case is being portrayed online and in the media, but then I read the rest of the story and discovered that the family would routinely let their dog wander about the neighborhood alone and unsupervised, and that the community where all of this happened does have a lease law, and I had to admit that, as usual, the situation isn’t quite as simple as headline writers or Internet wags would have you think…

First of all, it’s not as if the driver who actually hit the animal is turning around and asking for money. The motorist reported the accident and called on their insurance company to pay for fixing the car, just as you’d expect. Second, the insurance company has a responsibility to its owners (or stockholders, if it’s a publicly-traded company) to contain costs as much as possible; they are therefore quite reasonably asking the people whose actions caused the loss to pay for the cost of making things whole again. Without a court judgment the insurance company can’t force the family to pay them anything – and it’s debatable if the company will actually file suit, since this would be a small claims action. Until they do, this isn’t a legal demand; it’s just a request to fix something you broke…

And we should remember that the family did cause the accident. Even if there was no law against letting your dog run free on the books in their community – and there was – most people who’ve ever seen one know that dogs will sometimes run into traffic if you don’t stop them. Letting your dog run around the neighborhood whenever it wants to, however quaint and charming that might sound, means that there is a non-zero chance that one day somebody is going to hit it. The family in this story knew about that possibility and continued to let their dog roam freely anyway…

So there’s no question that the company has a legal right to do what they are doing; they do in fact have a fiduciary responsibility to take these actions. The question is, should they refrain from doing so in order to spare the family additional grief and sorrow (and possibly guilt) from having allowed their pet to wander into harm’s way? Does whatever responsibility the company might have to people who are not their customers (and did cause the situation through simple negligence) on the basis of their shared humanity over-rule their responsibility to their customers (to keep prices low) and their stockholders (to maximize profit)? Does the fact that the family was both willfully careless and knowingly in violation of municipal law negate their entitlement to humane treatment? Should the company absorb the cost of the repair rather than risk potential fallout from dog-lovers and libertarians who think dogs should be allowed to run free, or would doing so simply encourage more people to let their pets roam into traffic?

It’s worth thinking about…