An Auckland woman is "shocked" after being stung with a nearly $4500 vet bill after a neighbour's cat leapt into her garden and was injured by her dog.
Rebecca had let her dog Velma out to go to the toilet one night when her daughter heard barking.
The woman ran over to find a neighbour's cat had jumped over the fence – and Velma had pounced.
Rebecca said Velma's behaviour was out of character for a dog living in a house with felines.
"I felt awful for the cat, having been injured," she said.
Her neighbour took the cat to the vet.
But when the neighbour approached Rebecca to cover the nearly $4500 bill, they headed to the Disputes Tribunal.
"They found that I was liable for the full cost," Rebecca said.
"I was really shocked because it happened in my backyard, which I felt was my dog's safe space."
University of Auckland law school associate professor Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrere told Seven Sharp the dog's owner was "presumptively liable for any damage that their dog causes to anyone's property".
"Since a kitten or a cat is a piece of property, the owner of the dog is liable to any damage caused to the kitten."
Ferrere said while there were no legal limitations on where cats could wander, there were "pretty good restrictions on what dogs can and can't do".
If a dog "wasn't doing anything" in a neighbour's yard and was subsequently injured by another dog, Ferrere said a "particular type of liability" would apply.
"But if your dog was sort of wandering around and innocently went into someone's yard and didn't do anything, then the same situation would result. But if your dog was doing anything even sort of remotely problematic, then not only would there be sort of civil liability, but there would be criminal liability as well."
He added that the Dog Control Act "puts some pretty heavy penalties on those owners that don't control their dogs".
"But it's not really sort of a question of rights so much. It's just simply that we put a lot of restrictions on dogs, and we don't really put many restrictions on cats at all in this country. That's why we have a Dog Control Act and not a Cat Control Act."
However, Ferrere said it wasn't an issue of cats having more rights than dogs, but how they were treated as chattel property under the law "and so you get weird results like this".
"In the same way as that, you know, if a dog caused some sort of damage to a microwave on someone's property, the person would be sort of liable for that. The cat is in the same position as that sort of stationary property, and that's where the weirdness sort of comes in. So, it's not so much a question that cats have more rights than dogs, it's simply that we control them significantly less."
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