The Research Of Animals Tort Liability

Animal tort, which is under the category of object tort, has existed since ancient times. With the development of social economy, pet raising has become a common phenomenon whether in the countryside or the city. Besides cats and dogs, even some aggressive species, such as Tibetan mastiff, pythons and other animals have been kept as pets by people. Pets raising can always bring people happiness and spiritual company and add great pleasure to the daily life, however, the animals can cause a certain degree of security risk for their limited ability of thinking and behavior control. In modern society, animal wounding or animal tort has been common occurrence, the legislation of which, thus, should not be ignored in the system of tort liability law.In view of the universality of animal tort, the Tort Liability Law, which was introduced in 2010, has made a detailed regulation on the animal tort by an independent chapter. In the tenth chapter of Animal Tort Liability, detailed provisions has been made for the general and special criterion of responsibility attribution, as well as the principle of exemption from liability. However, in the judicial practice, there are still many problems in the trial of animal tort cases, such as the division of responsibilities between animal breeders and managers, whether or not the people who feed the stray animals casually can be determined to be the manager and so forth, which need further judicial interpretation.The discussion of the animal tort has been expanded from four aspects, namely, the animal definition, the imputation principle, the main responsibility and the exemption criterion. Further more, the problems in the national judicial practice have been analyzed in the division of responsibilities between animal breeders and managers, as well as the stray animals tort. As far as the author is concerned, in terms of legislation, rather than be set up by enumeration method, the "animal" in the category of animals tort should be divided into dangerous and non-dangerous animals, which impacts the exemption from liability on the animal tort rules. In view of this, the microorganism should not belong to the scope of the animal in tort liability law. Furthermore, dangerous animals which are allowed to raise, dangerous animals which are prohibit to raise and non-dangerous animals should be treated differently on the Statutory exemption reasons. Thus, the seventy-ninth and eightieth clause in the <Tort liability law> should be refined and adjusted. For the cases of harm from the abandoned animals, the original owner and the manager shall not be the responsible person. As to the determination of the responsibility of raising and managing people, the basis is the critical point of possession. In the judicial practice, some special problems of animal tort should be clarified and solved from the height of the unity of the application of law.