The One Bite Rule
I’m Susan Allen this is Open Range, Just like a dog, horses can be un predictable and sometimes a misplaced bite or a kick can put their owners in precarious legal positions stay tuned for a Connecticut case where the court ruled in favor of the horse. A horse owner with any sense excerises caution when introducing others to their animals. Yet even with the best intentions accidents can and do happen as was the case in Connecticut where the owners of a horse named Scuppy ended up being sued by a parents of a child who visited their farm over the pretense that Scuppy bit their son in the face. In court the kids parents argued that “a horse,by it’s very nature, any horse, is capable of biting someone without provocation”. ( If that is what they really believed why the heck did they allow their boy near the horse in the first place). Anyway, the settlement amount would have cost Scuppys owners the farm but because dear Scuppy had never been known to bite before his owners were released from all liability. All thanks to the “one bite”rule” a law with it’s roots in the middle ages that arrived in the US along with the Red Coats during the Revolutionary War and has been used predominantly in dog bite cases ever since. All of us with livestock and pets would do well to remember this “one bite rule” that holds the owner blameless for injuries inflected by an animal if the owner had no prior knowledge of the animals inclination to bite. In the Scuppys case it saved the farm.
