Dog Attack

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Yes, I realize all that, but I don’t see how that makes McD’s responsible for what happened.

We live in a world that has dangerous objects in it. Some of them can hurt or kill you. So be careful. I, for one, am very tired of the “blame someone else when you screw up” mentality that has infected our culture. Not to blast you specifically here; it’s just a peeve of mine.

That’s totally, 100% your own damned fault. Razors can be sharp - this is not rocket science - used to be the goal was to have them be as sharp as possible. If you use something dangerous like a razor while half asleep, or not paying attention, or drunk, or whatever, then you’re taking a chance. But you and you alone decided to do that. Nobody else has any responsibility for what happens as a result.

I can’t even count how many objects I have around my house that I could maim or kill myself with. I have a chainsaw, a ton of power tools, an oven, a chipper-shredder (there’s a liability lawyer’s wet dream!), and a few very sharp knives with (gasp) no safety mechanism to separate me from the blade. When using dangerous objects, it’s my responsibility to not fuck up. It’s also my responsibility to make sure those objects are in proper working order before using them, and to know how to use them safely. At least that’s how I was raised; I guess I have some “unamerican values” here.

Now, if something was defective - say, my chipper-shredder blade (with no maltreatment) comes flying apart and parts of it hit me in the face at high speed - that’s another issue. But if I, like a dumbass, cram my hand down into the thing and get it sliced off, that’s not their fault, and I don’t think they have any obligation to prevent me from doing that - not even a warning sign.

Being dumb, careless, or just plain old having an accident even when you did everything right, does not make somebody else responsible (except apparently in the eyes of the legal system). Not even if the coffee was hot, the razor was sharp, or the chipper-shredder didn’t have an arm-proof opening.

Sorry to vent. But this blame-everybody-but-yourself thing just really steams me. IMHO, part of being an adult is taking responsibility for your own screw-ups. But we seem like a nation of cry-babys who want somebody else to make sure there’s no possible way we could ever hurt ourselves.

peas on earth

42

bantmof, you do understand the legal concept of “negligence,” right? Not taking steps to correct a situation for which you have responsibility and which is likely to cause injury to others? I mean, this isn’t something that was just invented.

For some reason, your last post reminded me of Dan Aykroyd’s old SNL character who manufactured toys; the “Bag O’ Glass,” “Bag O’ Nails,” the “Invisible Pedestrian” costume . . .

“I love God! He’s so deliciously evil!” - Stewie Griffin, Family Guy

43

Actually I probably don’t. I know very little about law, so I wouldn’t wanna bet on anything I think about it being correct. I do have a vague layman’s understanding of the idea of course.

But I see a clear distinction between what is legally correct, and what is ethically correct, with the two often seeming diametrically opposed. Legally, it seems McDs had responsibility here for the reasons mentioned (if the coffee hadn’t been so hot, she wouldn’t have gotten burned). Ethically, I still think it was entirely her own fault. I’m honestly bewildered here - I can’t even imagine being in that situation and thinking that McDs was somehow responsible when I spilled something hot on my lap. Sure, if it hadn’t been hot, I wouldn’t have been burned - but so what? Coffee is sometimes hot. Hot things can burn you. The ultimate responsibility was still mine. One can play endless “what if” games and there is always a way to have avoided the problem. If cars were limited to 5 MPH, few people would die in car crashes, after all. And GM sells cars that can go 170 MPH when they know people are going to die in them as a result of going too fast! Let’s put a stop to this! If it saves even one life etc etc! Blech.

I guess I just don’t want to live in some dumbed down, every-possible-action-is-safe world where I can’t get a steaming hot cup of coffee because somebody else dumped one in their own lap. I have nothing against making products safer where practical without dumbing them down. But I have a considerable problem with this “everybody else is at fault when I screw up!” concept. (As if that wasn’t clear by now, hehe :slight_smile:

At least it seems to just be an American thing - so far most of the world hasn’t caught this disease. I’m hoping we’ll come to our senses sooner or later as well.

peas on earth

44

Yeah, these things are pretty weird sometimes. It might help, bantmof, to know that the jury did assign some percentage of the blame to the plantiff. She had some blame for spilling (and, I might, for holding the cup in a non-recommended location); McDonald’s soaked up the rest of the blame for serving their coffee near boiling.

That said, I was surprised to learn on one of those links that coffee served in households is supposed to be at 135 to 140 degrees! Right between boiling and room temperature. I always assume the coffee is going to be just below boiling - I might be wrong. Come to think of it, cool coffee might be a danger as well, since I don’t generally bother to make sure my cup is clean beyond not being full of dust or anything.

If you want an (imperfect) analogy - let’s say you were driving down the street, and since you weren’t paying attention, you sideswiped that big fat Hummer your neighbor leaves parked out front. Then your car bursts into flames, leaving you with burn wounds. The accident might be your fault - but surely if you know your car might burst into flame on a sideswipe, you’d have been paying more attention?

Funny - I think McD’s could have actually headed this sort of thing off with a little PR campaign ahead of time. “Tired of tepid coffee? Come get ours - piping hot! Don’t drink it too quick! Take a bite of your Egg McMuffin between sips! Leave the lukewarm stuff to the competitors.” I don’t know if it would have worked, though.

45

Bantmof:
I do sympathize with you posistion, but the issue here is expectation. You expect a razor, for instance, to be have a certain degree of sharpness. You expect coffee to be in a certain range of temprature–a range that you know will sting, but not require medical attention, should you burn yourself. Every day of your life, you make risk assesments and act on them. You are as cautious as you need to be in each situation, but no more. I don’t give my car a thourogh going over each time before I drive it-- If I owned a asingle engine plane, I would. To brilliantly tie this in to the original post (HA!), say you leave your three year old in the back yard for two minutes to run into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and return to find that two year old in the neighbor’s yard, mauled fatally by a dog. Most dogs will not kill children, so you assumed your neighbors’ dogs would not. THEY, on the other hand, knew their dog was violent or potentially violent–are they liable for not changing your expectations-- putting up an unclimbable fence and “Beware the Dog” signs?

46

This will surprise no one (I hope), but I see little difference between legal responsibility and ethical responsibility, and in an ideal world there should be none. Sure, sometimes the law is used as a tool to get someone something they probably don’t deserve, and sometimes it misfires and justice is not done, but that should not be how it usually is, and I don’t believe it is how it usually is. If I did, I couldn’t do my job.

BANTMOF says:

But the problem, see, is that the woman in question had no reason to believe she was dealing with a “dangerous object” that could seriously hurt or kill her; if she had known that, she might have acted differently. McDonald’s DID know, but they didn’t do anything to either end the danger (which they could have) or warn their customers (which they could have).

The problem is that we don’t know, from minute to minute, how careful we have to be. If you’re dealing with something that you think is safe, and you are reasonable in thinking that it is, then you might not be as careful as you would be in dealing with something you knew to be dangerous.

Ah, the victimization of America – it bugs me, too. And there are a lot of great examples of that in action, but this isn’t one of them. If someone hands you a cup of coffee, you expect that if you spill it, you’ll stain your clothes and sting your skin – you don’t expect that you’ll end up in the hospital. The fact that the woman dropped the coffee might have been her fault; the fact that she needed skin grafts was not.

47

I guess I must be wired differently or somethin’ :-). I never assume a razor or knife is “probably not real sharp so I don’t have to be too careful”. I’ve cut myself on knives before out of carelessness, but I blame only myself, not whoever sharpened the thing. And the only thing I assume about a cup of coffee is that it is above freezing (if it’s not solid) and below boiling (if it’s not boiling). I don’t even assume it’s coffee any more, having made that mistake once :-).

Is it McD’s coffee? :slight_smile:

Anyway, why does there have to be someone liable? I see that as a case where nobody is at fault. The guy with the dog? Nope - he had it in a fenced in yard. The 3 year old? No - too young. (OTOH the kid in the original post was old enough to know). The parents? Maybe they’re theoretically responsible for the kid’s safety, but as a practical matter, every parent has left their kid unattended for a few minutes here or there.

To me, it looks like a tragedy where nobody has really done anything wrong. I also don’t buy the “attractive nuisance” concept, which to me sounds like legalise for “I’m not responsible for my own actions”.

Ok - well, enough of my ranting. I’ll shut up about this topic now. But if reading this topic stresses me out and I have a heart attack, I’m gonna sue you all on account of I wouldn’t have had it otherwise and the thread was an attractive nuisance. :slight_smile: (Hopefully it’s obvious I’m kidding).

peas on earth

48

To clear it up (and I’m sorry I forgot to put it in the OP), a court ruled the dogs be destoyed (the owners did not want it destroyed), and no one saw the actual attack (not even sure if it was an attack or rough play). I also remember the paper saying that the owners claimed the dogs weren’t even bought to be gaurd dogs, just family pets, so it’s not as if the dogs were trained to be vicious. On the contrary, they were probably trained to be gentle.
I think it was a bad situation all around.

White Wolf

“Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.”

“Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them.”

49

Even thought the boy probably instigated the attack, the dogs should be put down. It was probably not the dogs fault for attacking, however, would you want to live next door to the dogs that mauled and killed your child?

I’ve said this before, but in Germany many homeowners are required to have a rider on their homeowners policy for pets ( not just large " dangerous" dogs, but all kinds of pets) in case Fido or Fifi wanders out of the yard and causes an accident. That way the acccidentee’s have some recourse for damages.

I agree completely with rottweilers being mislabled as bad dogs. Every rottweiler I’ve known has been a big marshmellow. It’s the little yipe yipe dogs that scare me.

My dog biting story: When I was about 7 or 8 a friend and I were playing in a mutual friends backyard. These friends had a Siberian Husky. When the mom came out to feed the dog she told us to leave him alone while he ate.the dog didn’t like to be bugged while he ate. Two of us listened to the Mom. Jeffie did not and constantly teased the dog. The dog growled several warnings before Jeffie ( mind you this is a 6 or 7 year old, bullets bounce off their chests at that age) was mauled by the dog. All I remember was scaling the fence faster than a pole vaulter and running all the way back to Jeffie’s house to blurt out incoheritly to his mom what happened. Jeffie needed something like 90 stitches in his head and spent the rest of the summer indoors. The dog was put down and I really don’t recall cops being brought in to investigate. I was never asked anything.
Jeffie grew up not to be afraid of dogs, but he never teased them again.