Personal injury

New York dog bite law changed in 2025

By Michael R. Cardinale, Attorney, admitted in New York 1997 · Last updated August 23, 2026 · 5 min read · read from the opinion in Flanders v Goodfellow

Most write-ups of this decision explain the doctrine and stop. The more useful thing about it is the part underneath: the case turned on what two mail carriers were willing to swear to, and that is where these cases are usually won or lost.

1. The change, briefly

On April 17, 2025 the Court of Appeals decided Flanders v Goodfellow and opened a second way to bring a dog bite claim in New York. What each route now requires, and which one fits a particular set of facts, is set out on our page about dog bites and animal attacks. This article is about the other half of the problem, which no change in the law fixes: evidence.

2. It started with a package at a front door

The claimant was a letter carrier. She had walked up to a house on her route to hand over a package, and was bitten on the arm and hand.

Nothing about that is unusual. What made the case worth reading is what happened when both sides described the same animal.

3. Two accounts, and nobody to referee them

The homeowners’ position was simple and, on its face, complete. They had never observed the animal behave aggressively. It had bitten nobody before. No neighbor had complained. On that account there was nothing to put them on notice and the case should have ended on summary judgment.

Two of the claimant’s colleagues told it differently. Both delivered to the same address. Both described the dog hurling itself at the front window as anyone approached, snarling and biting at the glass hard enough that a person inside the house could not plausibly have missed it.

Neither version could be checked against a document. There was no bite history, no complaint on file, no animal control record. Just two accounts of the same dog that could not both be true.

The Court of Appeals held that this was a reason to hold a trial rather than a reason to end the case, a credibility question belongs to a jury, and a defendant does not win by being the one who says nothing happened.

4. Where proof of this kind actually comes from

Owners are rarely lying when they say they had no idea. They saw the dog behave normally around them, which is generally true and entirely beside the point. The knowledge the law asks about is what a reasonable owner in their position should have appreciated, and that is usually visible to other people before it is visible to them.

In practice it surfaces from:

Other people who go to the same door. Postal and delivery workers, meter readers, home health aides, the person who reads the water meter. Several visits each, over months.
Municipal records. Animal control complaints, dog licensing, and health department reports of earlier incidents, which can exist without the owner ever having been told about them.
Warnings the owner put up themselves. A sign, a muzzle, a note asking couriers to leave parcels at the gate, a second fence. Every one of those is a person acting on something they knew.
What the neighbors say before anyone is a witness. People are markedly more candid about a dog on the street the week it happens than in an affidavit eight months later.
Employer records. Where a service is aware of a problem address, that awareness is often written down somewhere.

All of it decays. Deliveries get reassigned, staff leave, and memories of which house had the bad dog get vague fast. The paper is what survives, and most of it is created in the first few weeks or not at all.

5. If covering a route is your job

People bitten at work have one advantage almost nobody else does: colleagues who have met the same animal. That is precisely what carried Flanders past summary judgment, and it is worth acting on early, ask, before the round changes hands.

There is a second point worth knowing. Being on the clock does not confine you to a workers compensation claim; that system and a claim against the animal’s owner can proceed together, because the owner is a stranger to your employment. How the two interact, and what your employer’s insurer can later recover out of a settlement, is covered under hurt at work.

What to do now

Report it to the county health department. It is required for the rabies protocol, and it produces a dated official record of the animal and the address before anyone is arguing about anything.
Ask who else covers that address, and ask this week.
Photograph the approach, not just the wound. The window, the gate, the sign, where the dog was. Those change.
Write down what was said at the scene while it is fresh. Owners often volunteer something in the first ten minutes that they would put differently later.
Watch the clock: three years from the date of the bite under CPLR § 214(5), and far less if a municipality is involved.