Who Is Liable: Owners, Keepers and Caretakers

The person who owns the dog is liable under the statute for an unprovoked bite, without any proof of fault. That is the main claim in nearly every case, and it is paid, in most cases, by the owner’s homeowners or renters insurer. Ownership is a question of fact: whose dog it is, who acquired it, who licenses it, takes it to the vet and makes decisions about it. A husband and wife, or parents and an adult child in the same household, can all be owners.

Other people can be responsible too, under different rules. A dog-sitter, a house-sitter, a boarding kennel, a roommate or a relative who had the dog in their care when it bit someone is not the “owner” under the statute, but Michigan law holds anyone who takes on the care of a dog to a duty of ordinary care. If the sitter let a dog with a known history off the leash, or left a door open, the sitter can be liable for negligence, and the owner can be liable for the sitter’s negligence as well. A business whose employees brought a dog to work can be liable for the employees’ carelessness. A former owner who gave the dog away is not liable for what it does later.

Two groups are handled in their own chapters. Landlords are never “owners” of a tenant’s dog and are reached only through premises and negligence law (Chapter 9). Cities, counties and police departments are immune from the statutory claim for their police and animal-control dogs (Chapter 10).

MCL 287.351 imposes liability on “the owner of the dog” and does not define the term. Michigan has another dog statute that does. The Dog Law of 1919 defines “owner” to include “every person who keeps or harbors the dog or has it in his care, and every person who permits the dog to remain on or about any premises occupied by him.” MCL 287.261. That definition does not apply to the bite statute. The Dog Law says its definitions are “[f]or the purpose of this act,” the bite statute was enacted twenty years later as a separate act, and the Legislature’s choice to reach the “owner” alone in 1939, after repealing an 1850 statute that had reached the “owner or keeper,” is a deliberate narrowing: “a change in phraseology implies that a change in meaning was also intended.” Trager v. Thor, 199 Mich. App. 223, 230–231 (1993), aff’d in part and rev’d in part on other grounds, 445 Mich. 95 (1994). “By its own terms, the statute applies to the dog’s owner. … Because defendant was not the dog’s owner, he cannot be held liable under Michigan’s dog-bite statute.” Szkodzinski v. Griffin, 171 Mich. App. 711, 713–714 (1988).

The rule has been applied without exception to everyone short of an owner. A grandfather babysitting in his son’s home, who shut the family dog in a bedroom, was not an owner. Trager, 199 Mich. App. at 231. Neighbors “helping to look after the dog while its owners were away” were not owners: “The statute plainly refers to an ‘owner’—not a ‘keeper’ or ‘possessor’—and neither defendant owned the dog.” Adams v. Wooldridge (2013) (unpublished). A police handler who kept a department K-9 with him around the clock was not its owner: “We find nothing in the plain language of the statute that would support an interpretation that simply possessing, keeping, and taking care of a dog constitutes ownership for purposes of MCL 287.351(1).” Foster v. Szlaga (2016) (unpublished). A business that allowed a stranded customer to keep her dog in its store was not an owner. Fitzpatrick v. Bridgestone Retail Operations, LLC (E.D. Mich. 2019) (unpublished). A landlord is never an owner of a tenant’s dog. Szkodzinski, 171 Mich. App. at 713.

The word therefore carries its ordinary meaning: the dog belongs to the defendant. Ownership can be shared. In Thelen v. Thelen, 174 Mich. App. 380 (1989), a father and stepmother who had acquired a cocker spaniel that day were both sued as owners under the statute, and the claim proceeded against both. A dog acquired by a household is owned by the adults of that household who take it on, and the statutory claim should be pleaded against each of them.

Ownership is a question of fact for the jury and can be proved circumstantially. The Supreme Court affirmed a verdict against a Detroit dog owner in 1904 on the ground that “there was evidence that the defendant at the time was the owner of the dog which bit and injured plaintiff” and declined to reweigh it. Mulvey v. Stevenson, 138 Mich. 63, 63–64 (1904). Where ownership of the biting dog is disputed, proximity, the defendant’s ownership of matching dogs, and animal-control testimony are enough to reach a jury even against the plaintiff’s own inconsistent prior identification. Goodyke v. Wolfe (2004) (unpublished).

Procedurally, a defendant’s sworn denial of ownership on a motion for summary disposition shifts the burden to the plaintiff to come forward with evidence of ownership; the plaintiff in Trager offered none and lost the statutory count on that basis. 199 Mich. App. at 231–233. The evidence that answers a denial is documentary: the dog license, the rabies certificate and veterinary records, the microchip registration, the animal-control bite report, the adoption or purchase paperwork, social-media posts, and the homeowners policy under which the dog is insured. A defendant’s statement after the bite that the dog is “mine” is useful but not decisive. A true statement of ownership, or a vague assurance that the speaker “assumed all the responsibility,” does not create liability by itself, Wetzel v. Bolster, 169 Mich. 43, 46–47 (1912), but a person who falsely claims ownership knowing the victim is asking in order to learn who is liable is estopped from denying it. Robb v. Shepard, 50 Mich. 189, 190 (1883).

Common-law strict liability does not stop at the owner. It attaches where “(1) one is the possessor of the animal, (2) one has scienter of the animal’s abnormal dangerous propensities, and (3) the harm results from the dangerous propensity that was known or should have been known.” Trager v. Thor, 445 Mich. 95, 99–100 (1994). A “possessor” is the owner or a keeper, and keeper status requires control of a particular kind: “It is this proprietary control, akin to ownership, that we hold must be present to deem a party a keeper, and potentially liable, under the common-law strict liability principle.” Id. at 101. Possession “cannot be fairly construed as anything short of the exercise of dominion and control similar to and in substitution for that which ordinarily would be exerted by the owner in possession.” Id. at 103.

The Supreme Court drew the line at the temporary caretaker. The grandfather in Trager had agreed to watch the house and children for an afternoon; the dog came with the house. “We conclude that the temporary supervisory responsibility of the defendant in the present case did not provide him with sufficient proprietary control to attain keeper status,” and “the temporary caretaker of a domestic animal is not the animal’s owner or keeper, as a matter of law.” Id. at 104, 107–108. The Court of Appeals had held the opposite, seeing “no distinction between a temporary custodian, caretaker, or baby-sitter of an animal and the animal’s keeper,” 199 Mich. App. at 235, and was reversed on that point.

The older cases the Court relied on show what proprietary control looks like. A man who took a dog home and “kept him there in such a way that it can be said that the dog really lived there,” and “undertook to control his actions,” was the keeper, while the owner who had lost the dog was not. Burnham v. Strother, 66 Mich. 519, 520–521 (1887). A bailee who had the owner’s dog at his place for six weeks was the keeper, and the absent owner was not. Wetzel, 169 Mich. at 44. A mother who owned and controlled the farm where her adult son and his dog lived was the dog’s keeper. Jenkinson v. Coggins, 123 Mich. 7, 8 (1900). A husband who occupied the home on weekends was the keeper of his wife’s bulldog. Slater v. Sorge, 166 Mich. 173, 176 (1911). “Possession, rather than ownership,” is the criterion, which cuts both ways: a former owner who had given the dog away, even knowing it had attacked a child, was not liable for its later attack, because “his lack of possession is dispositive.” Moore v. Jergovich (1996) (unpublished) (citing Trager, 445 Mich. at 104–105).

The practical result is that common-law strict liability runs against the owner and against anyone who has taken the dog into his own home, business or long-term custody and controls it as an owner would, provided that person knew of the dog’s dangerous propensity. It does not run against a babysitter, a neighbor feeding the dog for a weekend, or a landlord. For the knowledge element, see Chapter 6.

The same decision that protected the babysitter from strict liability opened a different door. The Supreme Court held that a negligence claim lies against “one in temporary possession of a domestic animal,” because “a negligence cause of action arises when there is ineffective control of an animal in a situation where it would reasonably be expected that injury could occur, and injury does proximately result from the negligence. The amount of control required is that which would be exercised by a reasonable person based upon the total situation at the time, including the past behavior of the animal and the injuries that could have been reasonably foreseen.” Trager, 445 Mich. at 106–108. The Court of Appeals had put the point more broadly, and that part of its opinion was affirmed: “a person who undertakes to care for an animal—even temporarily—must discharge that undertaking with ordinary care under the circumstances,” and “[t]here is no logical reason to limit negligence liability to owners or keepers of animals, and Michigan law does not support such a limitation.” 199 Mich. App. at 236, 238. The grandfather in Trager, who knew the dog had bitten a child before, faced a jury on whether shutting it in a bedroom with the door closed was reasonable control.

The claim depends on what the caretaker knew. Sitters who had no knowledge of any dangerous propensity and faced no obviously risky situation owed no duty of constant control, Adams (2013) (unpublished), and the owner’s warning to the victim did not supply the sitters’ knowledge. The claim also runs in the other direction: a house-sitter left in charge of the household is the owners’ agent in caring for the dog, and “any negligence that might be attributed to [the sitter] would be imputed to defendants under usual respondeat superior principles.” Young v. Esker (1998) (unpublished). The owner does not escape by pointing at the person minding the dog.

Employers. When employees of a dog-food store used their own German shepherd to demonstrate a collar to a customer and the dog bit her, the owners were liable under the statute and the store was vicariously liable for its employees’ negligence in the same trial. The Court of Appeals rejected the argument that the owners’ statutory liability foreclosed the negligence claim: the statute “did not supersede or extinguish common-law negligence claims related to dog bites,” and Hill v. Sacka “did not address an employer’s vicarious liability under a negligence theory.” Ball v. Fourment (2017) (unpublished). Because the employer’s liability was vicarious, there was no allocation of fault between it and the employees. Id.

Businesses on whose premises someone else’s dog bites. A store that let a customer bring her dog inside was not the owner, not a possessor, and, on the record there, not negligent; the claim against it sounded in premises liability. Fitzpatrick v. Bridgestone Retail Operations, LLC, 444 F. Supp. 3d 786, 799–801 (E.D. Mich. 2020). A business that takes a dog into its own custody, a kennel, groomer or trainer, is in a different position: it has undertaken the dog’s care and owes the Trager duty, and if it keeps the dog long enough to exercise an owner’s control, with knowledge of the dog’s propensities, it is a keeper.