Lawyers at Slee Blackwell Solicitors LLP have co-authored an academic study, published by the British Medical Journal, on the impact of dog-related injuries and how they might be prevented.
A new interdisciplinary study published online in Injury Prevention (BMJ) uses anonymised civil claim enquiry data to examine the context and impact of dog-related injuries in England and Wales between 2017 and 2024. It is an important step forward because it looks beyond hospital admission figures and emergency department coding, and instead examines the circumstances of dog related incidents, the nature of the injuries sustained, and the longer term consequences that follow.
The study, entitled “Using civil claim enquiry data to understand the context and impact of dog-related injuries in England and Wales between 2017 and 2024”, is authored by Dr John Tulloch (Lecturer, Department of Livestock and One Health, University of Liverpool), Dr Gemma Ahearne (Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, University of Liverpool), and Jasmine Moxey-Butler and James McNally who lead Slee Blackwell Solicitors’ dog injury team.
The research brings together veterinary science, criminology, and personal injury law to answer a basic but under-addressed question. What actually happens when people are injured by dogs, and what does it do to them afterwards?
A policy briefing paper based on the findings of the work has also been submitted to inform future interventions, including whether there is now a case for exploring mandatory dog lead use in certain public spaces.
Why this study is different
Most published statistics on dog related injuries are derived from healthcare datasets, particularly hospital admissions. Those datasets are valuable, but they are blunt instruments for understanding risk.
The authors highlight several gaps:
- First, hospital records do not differentiate between dog bites and dog strikes. That matters, because dog strikes (injuries caused by dogs without a biting) can involve different mechanisms of injury and different prevention strategies.
- Second, not everyone who needs medical treatment will be admitted to hospital. Admissions data therefore capture only part of the harm.
- Third, healthcare datasets often contain little or no information about the longer term effects, including time away from work, loss of earnings, and psychological sequelae.
Using civil claim enquiry data addresses these gaps. In practice, when a person contacts a specialist personal injury solicitor, initial contextual and impact information is gathered before any decision is made about whether the claim can be pursued. That initial dataset can include the injured person’s age and sex, the location and context of the incident, the level of restraint, and the consequences, including physical injuries, mental trauma, treatment, time off work, and loss of earnings.
This is a genuinely novel methodological approach. It is the first study to bring together veterinarians, criminologists and legal professionals to examine dog bites and dog strikes using a solicitor database.
The dataset and what it contains
The researchers analysed anonymised civil claims enquiry data from 1 January 2017 to 31 March 2024, provided by specialist dog injury law firm, Slee Blackwell Solicitors LLP operating across England and Wales.
Within that period:
816 dog related incidents were recorded, comprising 842 individual claims.
Most incidents occurred in England (94%).
The vast majority involved dog bites (just over 91%), with around 7% involving dog strikes or other non-bite incidents.
The enquiry data included information that is rarely available in NHS coding or admissions statistics, including the land use or setting, whether the dog was restrained, whether it was with its owner, whether the injured person knew the dog, and the impact on the injured person’s health and livelihood.
Dog bites and dog strikes: Both can have life-changing consequences
One of the most interesting points for the general public is that dog-related harm is not limited to bites.
Dog bites accounted for the majority of incidents, and almost all bite incidents resulted in physical injury (98%). But non-bite incidents were also serious. In the non-bite group, 78% sustained physical injury, and the types of injury reported were often severe. Around 73% of non-bite injuries were described as fractures, with smaller proportions involving muscle, tendon or ligament damage and soft tissue damage.
The harm caused by dogs is clearly not just related to bites. A large dog colliding with an adult at speed, or knocking someone over, can cause serious injury. The data in this study support that, both in the predominance of fractures in the non-bite group and in the rates of surgical intervention. Nearly a third of those who were not bitten required surgery, and a quarter of those who were bitten required surgery.
The study suggests that for injury prevention, dog strikes should be treated as a distinct and serious category. For owners, it reinforces the basic point that control is not only about preventing biting. It is also about preventing foreseeable harm arising from a dog’s size, strength, speed, and behaviour, both in public and in domestic settings.
The psychological impact of dog-related injuries
Another key contribution of this study is its focus on the psychological consequences of dog incidents.
Most injured people reported psychological consequences. This was reported by 90% of bite victims and 76% of those who suffered other types of injuries.
Crucially, in 15% of all injured people, the study records a formal diagnosis of mental illness as a result of the incident. The paper identifies specific phobia (6.5%) and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (4%) within that figure. Other mental health consequences reported include anxiety, disturbed sleep, and avoidance.
This is not simply “shock” or short-lived upset. It is clinically recognised psychiatric injury following a traumatic event, often coexisting with physical injury, and sometimes persisting long after the wounds heal.
In civil personal injury practice, psychological injury has practical consequences. It can affect a person’s capacity to work, their confidence in public spaces, their willingness to exercise, their ability to go about routine tasks such as walking to school or attending appointments, and the dynamics of family life. In some cases, it can influence medical compliance and rehabilitation. It also changes the value and complexity of a claim, because psychiatric injury often requires separate expert evidence, treatment recommendations, and consideration of prognosis.
Where these incidents happen, and why that should shape prevention
The study breaks down where dog bites and non-bite incidents occur.
For dog bites, the three most common locations were:
- In front of a private residential property (just over 34%)
- On a highway or pavement (18%)
- Inside a private residential property (11%)
For non-bite incidents, almost half occurred in public spaces (49%). Among public spaces, the most frequent were outdoor recreational areas such as parks and nature reserves (34%), highways or pavements (23%), and “forestry, open land and water” (11.5%).
Two points follow from that:
- First, much of this risk sits at the boundary between private and public life. The “front of a private residential property” finding is consistent with scenarios that legal practitioners recognise, including a dog rushing out through a door or gate, or escaping from a property.
- Second, a large share of incidents occur in spaces used by the general public for ordinary activities, including walking, recreation, and travel. The public is entitled to use pavements, parks, and green spaces without being exposed to avoidable injury risks.
Restraint and owner control: What the study suggests
The data implicates lack of restraint as a major factor in dog-related injuries occurring.
In both bite and non-bite incidents, most dogs were unrestrained at the time:
- 79% of biting dogs were not restrained.
- 86% of dogs involved in non-bite incidents were not restrained.
Most dogs were reported to be with their owner at the time of the incident. The study reports that 69% of dogs involved in bite incidents and 77.5% of dogs involved in non-bite incidents were with their owner.
That combination, off-lead and with owner present, raises an uncomfortable but necessary issue about owner control. A significant proportion of harm appears to arise not from stray or ownerless dogs, but from dogs in the presence of their handlers.
Delivery workers: An occupational risk that deserves specific attention
The study identifies delivery workers as a high risk group for dog bites.
Delivery workers made up over one in four (28%) of those bitten. The most common scenario involved a delivery to a private residential property, where an unrestrained dog came out of the front door (12%).
This has direct relevance to public policy, to employers, and to individual households. Deliveries are now part of daily life. Many households receive multiple deliveries each week, and delivery workers often have limited ability to predict what is behind a door, gate, or hedge. A person can take reasonable care and still be exposed to risk if an unrestrained dog has access to the front entrance.
For owners, the practical message is simple. If you know you are expecting a delivery, and your dog has access to the door or front garden, you have to treat control as a safety obligation, not a matter of preference.
The cost of time off work and loss of earnings is substantial
The study also quantifies the economic disruption that follows dog-related injury.
Of those still working when injured:
- 59.5% of those bitten took time off work.
- 56% of those not bitten took time off work.
Time off work extended up to a maximum reported period of five years.
Loss of earnings was reported by over half of those bitten (54%) and by 41.5% of those not bitten.
A dog-related injury can be a sudden end to someone’s capacity to earn, with knock-on effects for housing security, family finances, and mental wellbeing.
What the study implies for law and policy
The authors urge that mandating lead use on highways and in public spaces should now be explored to boost public safety, particularly because so many claims involved unrestrained dogs in non-residential locations.
They note that current national legislation on lead control does not affect public highways or urban green spaces where many injuries occur. The Highway Code advises that dogs should be kept on a short lead on pavements and shared paths, but that is guidance rather than law. Local authorities can use Public Space Protection Orders, but their use and deterrent effect are unclear.
The recommendation is that national legislation be updated so that dogs should be on a fixed length short lead, less than two metres, on public highways and in urban green spaces, subject to exemptions where local authorities provide off-lead areas or exempt certain areas. The authors also propose that this should be supported by a nationally coordinated public communication campaign, to balance public safety with dog welfare.
The role of Slee Blackwell Solicitors LLP and why this matters for civil claims practice
From a research perspective, Slee Blackwell Solicitors were an ideal legal partner because the firm combines a long-standing specialist practice in dog injury litigation with the volume of real-world enquiries needed to generate meaningful, contextual data, rather than relying on the limited picture available from hospital coding and admissions statistics.
The firm’s personal injury department operates a dedicated national service for dog bite and dog-related injury claims, with many claimants accessing their legal services through its specialist website. The team is led by James McNally, who is widely referred to in UK media as “The Dog Bite Solicitor” and is recognised for this niche work in independent legal guides, such as the Legal 500.
That specialism is reflected in the outcomes the department reports, including substantial recoveries for victims with serious physical and diagnosed psychological harm, such as a £260,000 settlement for an ex-soldier left physically and psychologically scarred, and £250,000 recovered for the psychological effects of a dog attack on a postal worker.
Just as importantly, the team’s experience is not limited to the most dramatic bite cases as they deal with the wider spectrum of dog-related incidents that civil practice routinely encounters, including injuries occurring on pavements, in parks, and at the threshold of private homes. It is this breadth, combined with the firm’s consistent capture of early enquiry information about context and impact, that made Slee Blackwell particularly well placed to support research designed to quantify harm, identify patterns of owner control and restraint, and highlight the genuine clinical psychiatric injuries that so often follow these incidents.
When victims contact a specialist personal injury team, they are not only describing a wound or a fracture. They are describing what happened, where it happened, whether the dog was controlled, what they were doing at the time, how they felt afterwards, what treatment they needed, whether they missed work, and what has changed in their day-to-day life.
That context is central to civil liability. It informs whether there is a viable claim, whether the evidence supports negligence or statutory liability, and how damages should be assessed. It also provides a perspective that is not captured by admissions data alone.
Responsible ownership and understanding risk
A consistent theme across these findings is that many incidents occur in routine settings, during ordinary activities, and with dogs reported to be with their owners.
Responsible ownership is not only about intent. It is also about risk awareness.
Many owners will never see their dog bite, knock down, or injure someone. But the question is not whether harm is intended. The question is whether harm is reasonably foreseeable and preventable.
The study’s findings about unrestrained dogs, public locations, occupational risk for delivery workers, and the frequency of psychological injury all point in the same direction. There is a need for clearer expectations about control, particularly in spaces where members of the public have no choice but to pass close to dogs.
Conclusions
Dog-related injuries are not niche events, and they are not limited to bites. This new research provides a more detailed, context-rich view of how these incidents happen and what they do to people afterwards.
The headline figures are hard to ignore. A substantial proportion of incidents involve unrestrained dogs. Delivery workers make up a significant share of bite victims. Fractures dominate the non-bite injury category. Most victims report psychological consequences, and a meaningful minority receive formal psychiatric diagnoses, including specific phobia and PTSD. Many take time off work, and many lose earnings.
The study is unique because it uses a solicitor database to capture context and impact that healthcare datasets often miss. It therefore provides a stronger basis for targeted prevention strategies and informed policy discussion. It also underlines something practitioners see repeatedly. The true cost of a dog-related injury is often broader and longer lasting than the immediate physical wound.
