Let’s imagine you are showing your buyer a house. You open the door and look around: clear signs that there is a tenant, kids’ toys strewn about, a couple of dishes in the sink, that sort of thing. You show your client into the backyard, and suddenly a dog bites your client in the leg. You had no idea the dog was there; you had just gotten the lockbox code from the listing broker that morning and no other information.
We hold a dog’s owner responsible for injury or loss to a victim upon the first bite or injury that occurs. There is a limitation if the owner took reasonable precautions to prevent a foreseeable injury by the animal, so if the owner put the dog in a kennel, but a falling tree cracked the front of the kennel off, the owner wouldn’t be responsible because the falling tree jailbreaking the dog was unexpected. However, if the owner just put the dog on a leash staked into the ground knowing the dog was strong enough to rip the stake out, they would be liable. Under ORS 31.360, a dog owner cannot claim that it was unforeseeable that the dog could cause injury. Basically, at law, a dog is always a loaded gun, able to go off at any time. The owner can argue that the dog was provoked [if an open house attendee opened the dog’s cage door or poked the dog with a stick and got it riled up], but they can’t claim “he’s always been so friendly, how was I to know he could be aggressive.” It is taken as a legal fact that dogs can bite.
Oregon is a “one-bite state” too, so if the owner has a dog that has known tendencies of violence or unprovoked attacks [based on a single past occurrence or bite], the owner is held to an even higher standard and would be held strictly liable for any injury caused by the aggressive dog [i.e., no defenses, no claims of provocation] related to the dog’s previous behaviors. Just knowing that you have an aggressive dog that bites people who, e.g., are walking by the fence, means you need to take responsibility for injuries caused by the knowingly dangerous dog when it bites anyone walking by the fence.
A 1993 case out of Bend, Park v. Hoffard, also found that a landlord can be liable for injuries caused by the tenant’s dog when the dog attacks someone. If the landlord knows that the dog is knowingly dangerous [has knowledge that the dog previously attacked people or had bitten people], the landlord will be liable for the injury to a visitor if they have not taken measures to control the risk or to evict the tenant with the dangerous animal. Controlling the risk is more than saying, “Heads up, dangerous dog at house,” when showing the property. The landlord would likely need to do more, such as coordinating with the tenant to ensure the dog was cloistered somewhere safe or ensuring the dog was not at the property at the time of the showing.