The video shows an extract of a judge Judy case. The sound is hard to hear. I have heard it several times and the scenario is as follows:
https://youtu.be/vhGSavj5UGU
The claimant was walking her dog on a lead in what she described as the front yard but I believe this to be a public area or an area used by people living in a condominium. She was walking next to some garages. Her dog, inquisitively, sniffed in the area of some bushes. In those bushes was a tabby cat which the claimant says belongs to the defendant.
The cat attacked the dog, scratching the dog’s eye which required $4000 of veterinary treatment at the end of which the dog lost her eye. The claimant/plaintiff was looking for a court judgement that she be reimbursed for four thousand dollars. She got her award – judge Judy awarded $4000 to the claimant to be paid by the defendant.
The defendant said that the cat was not his. Judge Judy found that the cat was his and that he should have had his cat on a lead or kept his cat indoors and because his cat had damaged this woman’s dog he had to pay her compensation due to his irresponsibility.
I find judge Judy’s judgement incorrect the following reasons:
Firstly, she makes an all-encompassing statement that this man’s cat should have been on a lead or very closely supervised. However, she made no reference to any state or local laws which requires that a cat be on a lead. The fact that she made no reference to any such law indicates to me that it does not exist in that area (or, as Sandy in a comment states, that it is accepted that outdoor cats are supervised). It has to be said, in the USA, today, there are many laws which are gradually encroaching upon the historically free-roaming nature of the domestic cat.
It must be an omission by the judge that she made no attempt to modify her judgement on the basis that there is no law (ordinance) regarding cats being on leashes or kept indoors, or she appears to make no reference to any leash-law should it exist, in her judgment. That’s the first problem as I see it. Incidentally, the judge seems to have taken the view that cats are like dogs and can put on a lead without any problems. Cats do not like leads and they won’t follow their “owner” like a dog.
The second problem is that the dog had approached the cat (as I understand it), albeit that both the dog owner and the dog were unaware of the cat’s presence as the cat was in bushes. However, the cat would have been intimidated and defensively aggressive. The cat’s behaviour was defensive and reactive.
Judge Judy likens the action of this cat to attacking prey, which is extraordinary. She discusses the behaviour of cats attacking birds with the defendant and then likens that to what the cat did to the dog. This is completely incorrect because cats do not willy-nilly attack dogs as prey. Therefore judge Judy was wrong again.
I would judge this incident as “an act of nature”. In effect it was an accident (from a human standpoint), the coming together of two species of animal, inadvertently, without any malice or bad behaviour on the part of either the claimant or the defendant.
Therefore, there should have been no award of compensation. It was just bad luck. If on the other hand judge Judy wished to award some compensation to the woman she should have taken into account the fact that the dog, albeit perhaps inadvertently, was the aggressor and therefore there was an element of contributory negligence or misbehaviour from the dog’s owner. This should reduce the award to about half of what it is.
There is one last issue: if this occurred in a private area there may be rules on cats entering private areas and losing their ‘rights’.
Those are my thoughts on this at this stage. Do you have any? It is a case which goes to the heart of the indoor/outdoor cat debate and whether free-roaming cats are acceptable nowadays.
Judge Judy is an American television show. She is a real judge but her judgements on the show are not binding in the usual way but via a contract between the parties.
Yes you are correct that it’s moreover a show where no one really loses anything, it seems, but I don’t know that for sure. The judge has a moral duty to exercise proper jurisprudence, and I think she missed it on this one. As I said she didn’t even consider that the dog’s owner has at least an equal (if not total) duty to control or safeguard her own pet, but let it stick it’s nose where she could have prevented it and with full knowledge that any animals could have been hidden in that bush that could have injured her pet. If either owner had to take full blame, I believe this should have been the dogs’. Nothing was gained or learned from this case other than the judge was wrong, incomplete, flawed, overbearing, biased, ineffective, nasty and sent the wrong legal and practical conclusions to millions of viewers. I’d have said that even if I didn’t like cats.
It also occurred to me that there could have been a number of different animals in that bush that could have lashed out in defense. Dog owners have the means to keep their dogs safer than to let them stick their faces where they could be scratched or bitten by a hidden animal in a bush. Why no one else here and especially the judge failed to even consider that is just amazing to me.
No, there are probably urine smells from hundreds of animals all over that bush, all of which are stronger than a cat just sitting in there. And it doesn’t matter if the dog suspected or even knew the cat was there, the dog’s owner had responsibility to keep her pet’s face out of a place where it could have been scratched by a hidden animal of any kind. There could have been an opossum, a skunk, a raccoon, a squirrel, another dog, a snake, who knows what? Even if the cat was in full view, it’s the dog’s owner who has a leash on her pet and the responsibility and opportunity to keep it from possible harm. It’s weird how no one else gets that in this case, especially the judge.
Weird that in your first sentence you submarine your own conclusion. You stated that animals need to be controlled but you obviously aimed that at cats and not even the dog in this one case. You should pick your cases more intelligently if you want to present your cat-hating attitude in an intelligent manner and with an effective result. You lost credibility by your own failure to support your lead conclusion.
Yes, a lot of weight is given to putting on a show that you’d never see in a real courtroom. Sometimes it give the impression that whoever she deems the loser in the case is so wrong that any court would rule the same way. I’d guess that in this case more courts would not rule the same as she than with her. She goofed on this one, for the reason that I said in my prior comment.
Yes, agree that this person is rude in the extreme as well as unfair and wrong.