Nerve and Tendon Damage From Dog Bites in New York, NY Function Loss, Repair and Permanency

Function is the legal threshold

Agriculture and Markets Law 108(29) defines serious physical injury to include protracted impairment of health and protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily organ, alongside serious or protracted disfigurement. Subdivision 28 defines ordinary physical injury as impairment of physical condition or substantial pain. The difference is not rhetorical: section 123 raises the civil penalty ceiling from four hundred dollars to fifteen hundred where the injury is serious, allows that amount to be offset by restitution for unreimbursed medical expenses and lost earnings, and treats a further incident involving an already-adjudicated dangerous dog as a misdemeanor carrying up to three thousand dollars, up to ninety days, or both.

Hands, and the reason they are different

Health Department figures for 2024 record that nine percent of reported bites followed the person handling the animal and eight percent followed play, categories in which the hand and forearm are the exposed structures. A hand injury raises questions a wound photograph cannot answer: whether flexion and extension are complete, whether sensation is intact in each digit, whether grip and pinch strength returned, and whether repair or grafting was required. Those answers come from serial examinations and from therapy notes, not from a single discharge summary, and they are the material a permanency opinion is eventually built on.

The records that carry a functional claim

The useful file contains the operative report if repair was performed, the therapist's measurements over time, any electrodiagnostic study, work restrictions in writing, and a treating specialist's statement about what is expected to be permanent. CPLR 3043(a) entitles a defendant to demand a statement of the injuries and whether they are claimed to be permanent, the length of time confined to bed and to the house, the length of time incapacitated from employment, and the special damages claimed. Building those categories contemporaneously is straightforward; reconstructing them from memory two years later is not.

Infection and delayed complications

Health Code 11.27(e) requires the owner of a biting dog to observe the animal closely for ten days and report immediately if it dies, becomes ill or escapes, and Health Code 11.03(a) makes an animal bite or an exposure to rabies a condition reportable to the Department. In 2024, eleven percent of bitten residents, 433 people, received post-exposure prophylaxis, up from seven percent in 2015, while city records reflect no rabid dog found in New York City in more than sixty years. Wound complications that develop after discharge belong in the chart with dates, because a later dispute about causation is resolved on the sequence of documented findings.

Lost earnings, and the offset rule that follows them

An injury that limits grip or sensation frequently affects work capacity long after the visible wound resolves. CPLR 4545 allows a court, after a verdict, to reduce an award for past or future economic loss where that loss was or will be replaced from a collateral source, less the premiums paid for the two years preceding accrual and the projected future cost of those premiums, with voluntary charitable contributions excluded. Where future damages are substantial, CPLR 5041 governs how the judgment is structured between lump-sum and periodic payments. Both rules operate on documented economic loss, which is another reason to record time out of work as it happens.

Liability still turns on the animal's history

Agriculture and Markets Law 123(10) makes the owner or lawful custodian of a dangerous dog strictly liable for medical costs, and no further. Everything else depends on the propensity showing described in Collier v Zambito or, after Flanders v Goodfellow on April 17, 2025, on ordinary negligence in how the animal was kept or handled. Slotnick v Chaikin, decided May 28, 2025, confirms that the severity of an attack does not by itself establish what an owner knew beforehand, so a serious functional injury does not relieve the claim of its evidentiary burden about earlier behavior.

Two calendars run at once

CPLR 214(5) gives three years from the bite for a personal injury action, and CPLR 306-b requires service within one hundred twenty days after commencement of an action governed by that period. Where a public entity is involved, General Municipal Law 50-e(1)(a) requires a notice of claim within ninety days and 50-i(1) requires suit within one year and ninety days. A nerve or tendon injury often takes longer than that to reach a stable prognosis, which is why the filing decision and the treatment timeline have to be managed as separate problems rather than one.