How to Handle Dog Bite Incidents and Seek Compensation in Oklahoma
How to Handle Dog Bite Incidents
Hi, my name is Mike Ashworth. I’m an Oklahoma personal injury lawyer. I have done a number of these videos about dog bites and I continue doing them because we get calls about dog bite cases, many of them very, very, very, very severe weekly. I mean weekly.
Now part of that may be attributable to the fact that it’s summertime, more people are out and about, more people are walking their dogs and taking them to dog parks, and things of that. We’re not seeing dog bite cases generally with a leashed or restrained animal biting someone or someone going to a dog park and suddenly one of them becomes Cujo and starts attacking everything in sight.
What we’re seeing is that people are walking on walking trails, they’re walking around the block, they’re just walking in a park and dogs from nowhere, seemingly nowhere, descend upon them and attack them. We’ve had several vicious coordinated attacks where two dogs are attacking at once, and most generally we’re seeing pit bull mixes. Now I have two pity mixes and I love them and they’re very gentle but for some reason, we’re seeing mostly pity mixes and I mean we have one woman who essentially had to go through an amputation of a limb from an attack where she was walking on the Katy Trail.
Immediate Actions
The first thing you do is once you can free yourself from the situation, whether it’s on your own, the dogs just stop or a good Samaritan comes along, go get checked immediately. Do not poo-poo it even if you’re not draining dripping blood. It’s just like looks like just a bite and you’re like I had some Neosporin on that and some gauze and I’ll be okay. Go get checked out, go to the ER, and go buy an ambulance because you don’t know with the shock of what just happened to you, you may have broken bones and not know it especially if when the attack occurred you went down on the ground.
The next important thing is to try to find out whether it’s animal control that responds, the police department, or whoever. Do the dogs have collars? Do they have any kind of tags identifying them so you can find out who the owner is because the toughest thing we find in dog bite cases. Finding fault, who’s at fault, is quite easy but sometimes it’s a situation where I said it’s easy to find out who’s fault.
Collecting Evidence
Part of the problem is a lot of times we don’t know. If there are passersby that are there that say hey I’ve seen those dogs attack people before, get those people’s names, take your smartphone, snap a picture of them, and ask them do they know where the dogs are from, who owns the dogs, which house or which rental, which condo and find out exactly where those dogs belong because that’s who we have to go after for damages and even more important is hopefully they have some kind of insurance that will cover the damages but in a case where you’ve got $200,000 of bills like one case I’m thinking of, trying to find out who is accountable in terms of allowing the dogs to be in a rental property and did they have knowledge the dogs were vicious is very very difficult.
So if you get attacked, get checked out immediately, take an ambulance, go to the ER, follow up with any aftercare that they say you need and when you do that, if you can, try in that process to reconstruct as quickly as you can where it happened, who was there, how can we find them, maybe that somebody was there helping you. They didn’t give you their name but they said I live right over there and pointed out a house. Give us that information.
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Hopefully, this won’t happen to you. There are a lot of great dogs that walk around Tulsa, even a lot of our visitors here who may be transitory to some extent, a lot of them have dogs and their dogs are always very well-behaved and look well taken care of. It’s the ones that just let them roam about, that’s where people get really hurt.
Again, I’m Tulsa dog bite attorney, Mike Ashworth. Reach out to me at TulsaPersonalInjuryLawyer.Pro or call me at 918-924-5528. Go out, enjoy the weather, but play it safe and if you are fearful of dogs, it doesn’t hurt to have some pepper mace or bear spray with you. If it deters a bear, it will deter a big dog. Be safe.
