It’s a dog’s world
Owners of dogs that bite other dogs could pay big-time
Brandy, R.I.P.
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Tragedy struck when Brandy was
getting ready for her morning walk in her owner’s
neighborhood near Lake Springfield.
From across the street dashed a
neighbor’s rottweiler. Brandy, a 4-year-old shih tzu, weighed
about 10 pounds. A rottweiler tops out at more than 100 pounds.
Tethered to a leash in her owner’s front yard, Brandy
didn’t have a chance.
“That dog ripped her belly open,”
recalls Judy Randazzo, who owned Brandy with her husband, Jasper.
Randazzo risked her life trying to save
Brandy, throwing herself atop the rottweiler as it held a member of
her family in its mouth, shaking the tiny dog from side to side.
“I straddled that dog, trying to pull
him off my girl,” she says. “We loved her. She was just
like a kid to us.”
After the neighbor’s son came over with
a snow shovel and whacked the rottweiler a few times, Randazzo
says, she was finally able to pull Brandy free. Brandy’s
veterinarian dropped everything for several hours, cleaning dirt
from the little dog’s gut and pumping her full of
antibiotics. At one point, he even performed CPR. All the warming
blankets and prayers and sutures in the world made no difference,
though. Brandy died in the early afternoon, about four hours after
the Dec. 27 attack. “She couldn’t kick out of the
shock,” Randazzo says.
Randazzo started with the state’s
attorney’s office. She says she was told to hire a private
attorney. Then she called the police department, which told her to call
animal control. A Sangamon County animal-control official gave her the
bad news: The rottweiler could be impounded, but only long enough to
make sure that the dog had been vaccinated against rabies. If its
owners chose to retrieve it, the dog could be back in the neighborhood
in a week’s time.
In the end, the rottweiler’s owner
decided not to claim the animal, and so it was euthanized on Jan.
6. But Randazzo, who says that the rottweiler had previously
threatened dogs in the neighborhood while running loose,
isn’t satisfied. On Jan. 18, she and her husband sued their
neighbors David and Roberta Stapleton — and they want a lot
more than the $450 they paid for Brandy and the $661 they paid the
vet who tried to save their dog’s life.
The Randazzos want to be compensated for
mental and emotional stress, anguish, distress, depression,
anxiousness and fright, loss of sleep, loss of joy of life
“and many and numerous other conditions and ailments.”
All told, they’re looking for something between $15,000 and
$50,000.
The couple stops short of loss of consortium,
but the Randazzos and their attorney, Stephen Hedinger, are hoping
to take advantage of a precedent set last year when an Illinois
appellate court ruled that a pet’s value cannot be
calculated simply by what it would fetch if put up for sale. Courts
have traditionally used market value to calculate damages for dead pets
— but Blackie the cat was a different matter.
Blackie was at a veterinarian’s office
when someone left a door open, allowing a rottweiler to enter the
room and kill Blackie. Blackie’s owner sued for $100,000,
saying that she’d experienced nightmares, insomnia,
headaches, stress and had also gained 40 pounds, all as a result
grief over the loss of her cat. The defendants moved to dismiss the
suit, saying that the damages claimed far surpassed the cat’s
market value. A Cook County judge subsequently dismissed the case,
saying that Blackie’s owner hadn’t properly calculated
damages, but the appellate court last spring overturned the
decision.
Although six figures was probably too high,
the court said, just what Blackie was worth to her owner should be
up to a judge or jury to decide, and market value alone might not
be sufficient. “That is the law in Illinois at the
moment,” Hedinger says. “It’s pretty
revolutionary. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be a
compensable injury. People do get attached to their pets as they do
children and other loved ones.”
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