New York closed out 2025 with the second-highest average dog bite claim cost in the country. Insurers paid out an average of $92,154 per claim across 1,308 New York incidents, putting the state behind only California in total payouts and well above the national average of $65,450, according to homeowners’ dog bite claim data compiled by the Insurance Information Institute and State Farm. Those numbers reflect more than rising medical costs. They reflect a state where the legal framework governing canine attacks has been unusually plaintiff-unfriendly for nearly two decades, and where a single April 2025 ruling from the Court of Appeals has now opened a second avenue to recovery that practitioners on both sides need to absorb quickly.
For years, New York stood apart from most of the country by limiting injured plaintiffs to a strict liability theory rooted in the dog’s known “vicious propensities.” That bar was high, and it produced outcomes that struck many as unjust, particularly in first-bite cases where the animal had no documented history. The Court of Appeals’ decision in Flanders v. Goodfellow has now reset the framework, creating a dual-path liability structure that sits alongside the state’s existing statutory scheme. Understanding how these layers interact is now essential for personal injury counsel, defense attorneys, insurers, and the homeowners and landlords whose exposure has materially shifted.
The Statutory Floor: Strict Liability for Medical Costs
Before reaching the common-law questions, every New York dog bite analysis begins with Agriculture and Markets Law § 123, which governs dangerous-dog adjudications. Subdivision 10 imposes strict liability on the owner or lawful custodian of a dog adjudicated dangerous for medical costs resulting from injury caused by that dog to a person, companion animal, farm animal, or domestic animal. The dangerous-dog determination flows from § 123(2), which authorizes a private citizen or a local dog control officer to file a complaint and obtain a judicial hearing on whether the animal meets the statutory definition. A walkthrough of New York’s dangerous dog statute lays out how that adjudication interacts with civil recovery, including the practical reality that lower courts have allowed strict-liability medical-cost recovery in unlimited amounts following such a determination, as in Christensen v. Lundsten.
Two features of § 123 deserve emphasis. First, the strict liability under subdivision 10 is narrow: it covers medical costs only. Pain and suffering, lost wages, loss of consortium, and other non-economic damages fall outside subdivision 10’s reach and must be pursued under separate theories. Second, subdivision 12 expressly preserves common-law and other statutory remedies, meaning § 123 supplements rather than displaces the broader liability framework. That preservation clause is what gave the Court of Appeals room to reshape the common-law side without disturbing the statute.
The Bard Rule and Why It Frustrated Plaintiffs
From 2006 through April 2025, the gateway to non-medical damages in a New York dog bite case ran exclusively through Bard v. Jahnke, 6 N.Y.3d 592. Bard held that an owner of a domestic animal could be held liable only on a strict liability theory, and only if the plaintiff proved that the owner knew or should have known of the animal’s vicious propensities. A vicious propensity meant a natural inclination or habitual tendency to act in a way that endangered others, evidenced by prior acts the owner had reason to notice. Critically, Bard slammed the door on ordinary negligence claims, reasoning that a separate negligence theory was indistinguishable from one premised on the same propensity knowledge.
The doctrinal effect was severe for plaintiffs. A first-bite victim with no evidence that the dog had previously snapped, growled, or lunged at someone faced summary judgment on both theories. Even cases involving substantial injuries, including those requiring reconstructive surgery, are regularly washed out before reaching a jury. New York stood largely alone among the states in this restrictive posture, and the rule produced what the Court of Appeals would eventually call “unworkable and in some circumstances unfair” results. Practitioners working through the broader landscape of factors determining dog bite liability across states can see how unusual the New York posture had become.
Flanders v. Goodfellow: The April 2025 Reset
On April 17, 2025, the Court of Appeals decided Flanders v. Goodfellow and abandoned the Bard regime. Rebecca Flanders was a postal carrier delivering a package to the Goodfellow residence when the homeowners’ 70-pound dog rushed past its owner and seized her shoulder, causing injuries that required multiple surgeries and left permanent scarring. Two other postal carriers submitted affidavits describing the same dog repeatedly slamming itself against the Goodfellows’ windows, baring its teeth, snarling, and growling during prior deliveries. The lower courts dismissed both Flanders’ strict liability and negligence claims, citing Bard.
The Court of Appeals reversed and went further. It first reinstated the strict liability claim, holding that vicious propensities can be established without proof of a prior bite when behavior such as growling, lunging, or baring teeth would put a reasonable owner on notice. The postal carriers’ affidavits raised a triable question of fact about constructive knowledge, even though the Goodfellows denied seeing the conduct. Then, drawing on §§ 509 and 518 of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, the Court overruled Bard outright and recognized a separate negligence cause of action for harms caused by domestic animals. Plaintiffs may now proceed under either theory or both.
What the Dual Path Means for Practitioners
The post-Flanders framework gives plaintiffs two viable theories where Bard had effectively offered one. Each carries its own evidentiary demands, its own defenses, and its own strategic considerations, and the choice between them, or the decision to plead both, will turn on the specific facts of the attack and what the discovery record can support. The three subsections below sketch where each path stands today and the questions trial courts will need to resolve before the framework fully settles.
Strict Liability After Flanders
Strict liability remains the cleaner theory when evidence of prior aggressive behavior exists. What has changed is the threshold for what counts as evidence of propensity. Flanders confirmed that growling, snapping, baring teeth, lunging, and other warning behaviors qualify, and that constructive knowledge can be established through affidavits from third parties who observed the conduct. The reasoning in Hastings v. Sauve, 21 N.Y.3d 122, that vicious propensity includes any behavior reflecting a proclivity to act in a way that puts others at risk, now carries substantially more weight in summary-judgment practice.
Negligence Returns to the Kennel
The negligence path requires the familiar duty-breach-causation-damages structure. Counsel building a case under this theory will be working through the same elements of a negligence claim that govern any New York personal injury matter, with the duty calibrated to the reasonable care an owner owes in managing a domestic animal. Failure to leash, failure to secure a yard, failure to warn delivery workers, ignoring early signs of aggression, or permitting unsupervised contact between a dog and a child can each support a negligence claim regardless of whether the dog had a documented history. The Court of Appeals framed the duty in terms of foreseeable harm, signaling that trial courts will now evaluate owner conduct against ordinary tort principles rather than the older propensity-only filter.
Open Questions Trial Courts Will Define
Several questions remain genuinely unsettled. Landlord and property-owner liability for tenants’ dogs has long depended on actual or constructive knowledge of the specific dog’s vicious propensities under Strunk v. Zoltanski and its progeny; whether Flanders extends a duty of reasonable care into the landlord-tenant context will be litigated in the months ahead. Comparative fault principles, which the older strict liability framework largely sidestepped, will now apply with full force to negligence claims, raising the relevance of provocation, trespass, and victim conduct. And the duty owed by professional dog walkers, sitters, groomers, and kennels, where commercial actors already faced negligence exposure, may now interact in unexpected ways with the homeowner’s parallel duty.
The Stakes for New York Defendants and Insurers
The financial backdrop makes Flanders’ practical impact unusually pointed. New York’s $92,154 average claim cost is roughly 41 percent above the national average and trails only California’s outsized claim volume in total state payouts, which reached $121 million in 2025 against just 1,308 New York claims. The state’s average per-claim cost has historically reflected severe injury patterns and high medical and litigation costs in the downstate region, but the trend is also driven by what Triple-I describes as a 97 percent rise in average claim cost over the last decade, propelled by larger settlements, judgments, and jury awards.
National data underscores why these claims warrant serious treatment regardless of theory. Roughly 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs each year in the United States, and CDC dog bite mortality data recorded 468 deaths from being bitten or struck by a dog over the eleven years ending in 2021, with annual fatalities more than doubling between 2018 and 2021. Children remain disproportionately represented among severe-injury victims. For homeowners insurers, whose policies typically cover dog bite liability up to $100,000 to $300,000 in standard limits, the Flanders dual path increases the likelihood that ambiguous-knowledge cases that previously washed out at summary judgment will now reach juries, with corresponding effects on reserves, settlement values, and underwriting decisions.
Defense counsel face a recalibrated calculus. The strict liability path remains live and is now easier for plaintiffs to satisfy on constructive-knowledge evidence. The negligence path is genuinely new territory, demanding investigation into the owner’s actual conduct rather than just the dog’s history. Plaintiffs’ counsel, in turn, must take care to plead both theories where the facts allow, since the strict liability claim still carries the simpler causation chain when the propensity evidence holds up.
Looking Ahead: A Three-Layer Framework Takes Shape
Flanders v. Goodfellow brings New York into rough alignment with the thirty-six other states that already permitted negligence claims in domestic-animal cases, but the alignment is partial. Section 123’s dangerous-dog adjudication still produces strict liability for medical costs at the statutory floor, the propensity-based common-law strict liability theory survives in its post-Flanders form, and ordinary negligence now sits on top of both. The result is not a simpler regime; it is a layered one, and each layer carries its own evidentiary requirements, defenses, and damages reach.
The practical consequences will surface in three places first. Settlement values in ambiguous-knowledge cases, which previously discounted heavily for the risk of summary judgment, will recalibrate upward as defense counsel weigh the cost of a jury trial under either theory. Insurance underwriting and reserving will respond to the same shift, particularly in the downstate region that drives much of New York’s per-claim severity. And appellate doctrine will need to fill in the gaps Flanders deliberately left open, including the duty owed by landlords, the operation of comparative fault under the negligence path, and the threshold for constructive knowledge of vicious propensities.
For New York practitioners on either side of the bar, the immediate task is straightforward. Plaintiffs’ counsel should plead both theories where the facts permit and develop propensity evidence aggressively under the broadened post-Flanders standard. Defense counsel should pivot from the predictable Bard playbook toward fact-intensive investigation of owner conduct and reasonable care. Insurers and the homeowners and landlords who carry the underlying exposure should expect more cases to survive summary judgment and budget accordingly. The framework will continue to evolve as trial courts work through it, but the architecture is set, and the days when a New York dog bite case reflexively rose or fell on a single propensity question are over.
