Day on Torts
An animal shelter that had not witnessed any aggressive behavior from a dog did not have a duty to warn the person who adopted the dog of its alleged dangerous propensities.
In Hall v. Robertson County, Tennessee, No. M2025-00163-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. May 21, 2026), the plaintiffs filed a negligence claim under the GTLA against a county after the wife was bitten by the dog her husband had adopted from the county shelter. The dog came into county custody when a woman called animal control to report a stray dog. The woman said that she was afraid that if she left her home, the dog would attack, but the woman did not see the dog bite anyone. The dog was retrieved without incident and was observed by the employees at the shelter for 26 days. During that time, no employees noticed any aggressive behavior. The dog was allowed to lay by the front desk and interact with a child during its stay.
After the dog was approved for adoption, the plaintiff husband adopted the dob. The dog began coughing up clear liquid after leaving the shelter, and it was diagnosed by a vet with kennel cough and congestive heart failure. When the plaintiff husband returned to the shelter to retrieve certain items, a worker allegedly replied to the news that the dog had heart failure by saying “you should have seen her when we first got her…she was holy hell.”
When the dog returned home from the vet, the plaintiff wife approached the dog to pet her. At that time, the dog bit the plaintiff wife and caused significant injuries. The plaintiffs filed this negligence case against the county under the GTLA, but the trial court granted summary judgment for the defendant county, which the Court of Appeals affirmed.
In its motion for summary judgment, the county argued that the plaintiffs “could not prove the incident was reasonably foreseeable, and therefore, could not establish the element of duty in their negligence claim.” Noting that “in the context of duty, whether the risk of injury was foreseeable must first be established,” the Court of Appeals wrote that the “the determinative issue in this case [was] whether the dog’s attack was foreseeable given the information shown to be available to the County.”
The plaintiffs argued that three pieces of evidence created a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether the county had a duty to warn them about the dog—1) the woman who placed the initial call labeling the dog as aggressive on the impoundment form, 2) the woman who made the initial call’s affidavit, and 3) the shelter employee saying the dog had been “holy hell.” Regarding the impoundment form, the court explained that the use of the word aggressive was a subjective statement from a non-county employee, and that the county itself did not elect to mark that the dog was aggressive on the form. Considering the affidavit, the Court wrote that the plaintiffs mischaracterized what the woman said in her affidavit, and that the affidavit did not include descriptions of “relentless aggression” and admitted that the woman never tried to walk past the dog or saw it attack anyone. Finally, in relation to the “holy hell” statement, the plaintiffs admitted that they did not follow up and ask what the statement meant, and that the statement was made in response to a conversation about the dog’s physical health, not temperament.
Considering the evidence as a whole, the Court agreed that the plaintiffs had failed to show that there was a genuine issue of material fact regarding whether the dog’s attack was reasonably foreseeable. The defendant county presented testimony from multiple employees that they observed no dangerous behaviors from the dog, and that the dog was allowed out of its kennel to interact with a child and a person of small stature. The Court wrote that the plaintiffs’ evidence had not been connected to the county’s knowledge and did not “create more than a metaphysical doubt” of the facts. Summary judgment for the county was thus affirmed.
Dog bite cases are typically governed by a specific Tennessee statute, but this one fell under the GTLA because the defendant was a governmental entity. Nonetheless, the plaintiffs’ failure to show that the dog had exhibited dangerous propensities was fatal to their case.
This opinion was released seven months after oral arguments.