First steps after a dog bite
Get the wound looked at the same day, even when the bite looks small. Dog teeth leave puncture wounds that carry bacteria deep under the skin, and bites to a child’s face or hands can scar if they aren’t cleaned and closed right. A doctor can also decide whether you need antibiotics, a tetanus booster or rabies shots, and that decision can’t wait a week.
In Shreveport, the emergency department at Ochsner LSU Health Shreveport Academic Medical Center is a Level I trauma center, the place for severe or deep wounds. Willis-Knighton Medical Center and CHRISTUS Highland Medical Center also run emergency rooms, and an urgent care visit works for a smaller bite. Whatever you choose, keep every piece of paper they hand you.
That visit does double duty. Under the Shreveport Code of Ordinances, any doctor, hospital or clinic in Caddo Parish that treats an animal bite must notify Caddo Parish Animal Services. For the dog to stay impounded, a medical doctor has to verify the bite or scratch, and proof of that visit must be given to Caddo Parish Animal Services. So ask for a copy of the doctor’s note before you leave.
Report the bite yourself, even if the owner says they will. The place to call is Caddo Parish Animal Services and Mosquito Control at (318) 226-6624, or in person at 1500 Monty Street in Shreveport. If the bite happened inside the city, the City of Shreveport points residents to that same parish agency for stray, dangerous and uncontrollable animals. If the dog is still running loose, call the police so an officer can get there first.
Once you report to the police, the sheriff, the Caddo-Shreveport Health Unit or parish animal services, animal control must seize the dog and hold it 10 days. If no owner can be found, the dog is held four days and then put down so it can be tested for rabies. The dog’s owner has a separate duty under the Shreveport Code of Ordinances to notify Caddo Parish Animal Services after a bite. Owners don’t always do it, which is why your own call matters.
The owner does get some say in where the dog waits out the quarantine. An owner may confine a currently vaccinated dog at a veterinary hospital in Caddo Parish instead, but must do it within 12 hours and tell animal control which hospital. Home observation needs the director’s approval, a registered and vaccinated dog, and your signed written agreement, which protects the parish from liability but does not release the owner. Read that agreement before you sign, and know you can say no.
The owner is supposed to pick the dog up as soon as the quarantine ends, and on the twelfth day an unclaimed dog becomes the property of Caddo Parish Animal Services. Ask the agency for the quarantine record and the vaccination status when it’s done; both go into your claim file.
Photos and paper are the rest of the job. Photograph the wounds the day it happens and again every week or two as they heal, because scarring shows up over months, not days. Bag the torn or bloody clothing, and take pictures of the yard, the fence, the gate or the leash where it happened. Get the owner’s name, address and insurance company if they’ll share it, plus names and numbers for anyone who saw the bite.
Write down what the dog looks like, its name if you heard it, and anything a neighbor says about it biting before. Under the Shreveport Code of Ordinances, dogs must be kept confined and not allowed to run loose, with exceptions only for search and rescue, legal hunting and herding livestock. A photo of a broken gate or a dog roaming the street speaks to that rule later.
Most people also want to know what happens to the dog. If animal control classifies the dog as dangerous, the owner must keep it indoors or in a locked, secure pen, and an invisible or electronic fence doesn’t count. A dangerous dog can leave the property only muzzled, on a leash no longer than four feet, and handled by someone 18 or older. The owner must tell animal control right away if a dangerous dog gets loose, bites a person, attacks another animal, is sold, dies or moves.
If the owner doesn’t appeal the label and then breaks a restriction, the dog can be seized, becomes animal services property and is disposed of as the director decides. A dog classified as vicious is impounded, held for rabies quarantine or 10 days after the owner is notified, then euthanized unless the owner appeals within those 10 days. A dog isn’t classified as vicious if the bitten person was trespassing to commit a crime or tormenting the dog, or the dog was protecting its owner or young. Those same facts, provocation and trespass, come up again when the insurer decides whether to pay.
Responsibility for a Shreveport dog bite
With the bite treated and reported, the next question is who pays. Louisiana makes the dog’s owner responsible for a bite only when the owner could have prevented it and you didn’t provoke the dog. In most cases the owner’s homeowner’s or renter’s insurance pays the medical bills and other losses, so you’re usually not taking money from a neighbor.
Lawyers call this strict liability, meaning you show the owner could have prevented the bite and that you did not provoke the dog, not that the owner was careless. Whether the owner has insurance is not one of those conditions. For other animals, Louisiana makes you prove the owner knew of the danger and failed to use reasonable care; that extra step doesn’t apply to dogs. You may have heard of a one bite rule that gives an owner a free pass the first time, and Louisiana doesn’t follow it.
Being responsible and actually paying are two different things. Most dog owners can’t cover an emergency room bill out of pocket, but a homeowner’s or renter’s policy often carries liability coverage for injuries the policyholder causes. Whether a specific policy covers your bite depends on its wording, since some carriers exclude certain breeds or dogs that have bitten before. Finding the policy is one of the first things we do, because a claim against a neighbor with no coverage is hard to collect.
Who counts as the owner is broader than you might think. Under the Shreveport Code of Ordinances, a dog’s owner includes anyone who keeps it, harbors it or lets it stay on their property, not only the person who bought it. That matters when a relative’s dog bites while staying at a Caddo Parish home, or a roommate’s dog bites at a rental in someone else’s name. When the bite happened at a rental, we also look at what the landlord knew and controlled, since that is a separate question.
Showing the owner could have prevented the bite is easier than it sounds, because Shreveport writes down what owners must do. Under the Shreveport Code of Ordinances, no one may let a dog they have or keep at their place run loose on unenclosed land or go onto someone else’s land. A dog that slips a broken fence, roams the sidewalk off leash, or is left alone with a toddler is the kind of harm an owner could have prevented.
Animal control’s label for the dog also matters to the insurer. Under the Shreveport Code of Ordinances, an unprovoked dog is dangerous if it bites or menaces someone in public, or bites a visitor allowed on the owner’s property. A dog is vicious if it caused severe injuries or death, broke the rules after being labeled dangerous, or can’t safely live around people, and breed alone never counts.
A dangerous or vicious finding is a public record of the dog’s history, and it carries weight with an adjuster who is deciding whether to pay. We request that file from Caddo Parish Animal Services and Mosquito Control before we send the insurer anything.
Provocation and shared fault
Knowing who is responsible leads straight to how the insurer will try to shift blame onto you, and it has two tools: provocation and shared fault. Provocation comes first. A dog owner is not strictly liable for an injury that happened because the injured person provoked the dog. If the insurer can show you hit, cornered or teased the dog, the owner’s automatic responsibility goes away.
Provocation means something you did to set the dog off, not being near it. Walking past a yard, ringing a doorbell, reaching to pet a calm-looking dog, or a toddler stumbling toward a dog are the facts insurers stretch to call provocation. The details of those few seconds matter, including how old you or your child was and what the dog had done before.
If animal control labeled the dog dangerous after your bite, we pull that file early, because the agency looked at the same question you’ll be asked.
Shared fault is the second tool, and it works by percentage. Comparative fault divides blame by percentage, and damages means the money paid for your losses. Below 51 percent, your damages drop by your share; at 51 percent or more, you collect nothing. Write down exactly where you stood and what you were doing in the seconds before the bite, because the insurer will use those details to argue you share blame.
Insurers raise provocation often, because saying it costs them nothing. Saying it and proving it are different things. We interview the neighbors and any witnesses, get the Caddo Parish Animal Services and Mosquito Control report, and look for the dog’s history before the adjuster settles on a story. Facts like a prior complaint, a beware-of-dog sign, or a chain that had been broken for weeks change the conversation.
Losses a dog bite claim can cover
Once fault is settled, the next question is what the claim can pay for. In Louisiana, a person whose fault causes harm to someone else must make up for that harm. Future medical costs count only if they are tied directly to a clear, real injury or illness of the body or mind.
Economic losses are costs you can show with a bill, starting with the emergency room or urgent care visit, rabies shots if the dog cannot be found, and antibiotics. Deep bites can need surgery to fix muscle or tendon, and bites to the face often need scar repair later, sometimes more than once. Counseling for a child who now panics around dogs, or for an adult with nightmares, is a medical cost like any other. Lost pay counts too, including days you missed for treatment and time you could not work while the wound healed.
Non-economic losses are the harms no receipt can show. Pain and suffering means the physical pain of the bite and the healing, and mental anguish means the fear, worry, and lost sleep that follow it. Disfigurement is its own category, meaning a visible scar or change to how you look, and it counts for more when the scar is on a face or hand. Loss of enjoyment covers the things you stopped doing, such as a child who will not go to the park or an adult who gave up a daily walk.
The bigger risk is settling before you know the full picture. Scar repair often waits months, and for a child it may wait years until growth stops, so an early offer can leave it out. Before any demand goes out, we ask the treating surgeon for a written opinion on future care, so the number covers the whole injury.
Keep every bill and a short log of the work days you missed. Also keep each explanation of benefits statement, which is the notice from your health insurer showing what it paid for each visit and what you owe. Those pages turn a general claim into a specific one.
Deadline to file a dog bite claim
Knowing what the claim covers means little if it’s filed too late. In Louisiana, a lawsuit over a dog bite must generally be filed within two years of the day the bite happened. Talking with the insurer does not pause that clock.
Lawyers call this window the prescriptive period, the time the law gives you to sue before the claim is gone for good. The clock stops only when you file suit in a court that has authority over the case and sits in the proper location. A claim number, an adjuster’s promise to call back, or months of friendly emails do none of that. The deadline runs against minors too; the only exception for children covers permanent-disability claims under product-liability law.
For a bite in Shreveport, that filing happens at the Caddo Parish Courthouse, where the First Judicial District Court (1st JDC) hears civil cases from across Caddo Parish. Smaller claims can go to Shreveport City Court instead. We calendar the deadline from the first call and file in the 1st JDC with room to spare if the insurer hasn’t paid by then.
Waiting hurts for a second reason that has nothing to do with the court. Doorbell camera footage gets overwritten, the neighbor who saw it moves, and the dog’s quarantine file gets harder to pull as months pass. The deadline can feel far away until months have passed and the scar still has not settled.
Dog bite claims for children
Many people reading this are parents, and a child’s claim works differently in a few ways that matter. An unemancipated child, meaning one still under a parent’s legal authority, cannot sue alone, so the parents or the child’s tutor, a court-appointed guardian, bring the claim. Everyone with parental authority over the child must join the suit unless a joint custody order says otherwise, and if the child has a tutor, the tutor sues. If you are divorced or separated, bring the custody order to the first meeting so the lawyer can see who needs to sign.
The filing deadline covered above runs on a child’s claim the same way it runs on yours. In Louisiana, the clock on a lawsuit keeps running while your child is a minor unless a specific law creates an exception. Write down the date of the bite and keep it with the papers from the doctor and animal services.
Settlements for children also go through a judge. If a settlement pays a child, the court can order it held by the court, put in an approved investment or trust, or paid over time in a structured settlement. A judge may order the money paid into the court registry, an account the court holds for the child, with withdrawals allowed only with the court’s approval. This adds a court date, but it protects the child, and the lawyer handles the paperwork.
Future costs carry more weight in a child’s case. Small children stand at face height with most dogs, so bites to the cheek, lip, and scalp are common. Scar repair on a growing face is often done in stages, and counseling for a child who now fears the neighbor’s dog also has a cost. We ask the treating doctor to put the expected future care in writing before anyone talks numbers.
Talking to a Shreveport dog bite lawyer
With the rules and the deadline laid out, the last step is getting help, and the first conversation is shorter than most people expect. We’ll ask what happened, where it happened, who owns the dog, what treatment you’ve had, and whether anyone from an insurance company has called. You don’t need a polished file; what you have on your phone is a fine start.
If you can, have these ready: photos of the wounds, your discharge papers and bills, and the case number from Caddo Parish Animal Services and Mosquito Control. Add the owner’s name, address and insurer if you got them, names and numbers for witnesses, and the custody order if the person bitten is your child. If you’re missing half of it, say so; we request records from the hospital and animal services as a matter of routine.
From there the work is ours. We send letters to preserve evidence, such as a neighbor’s doorbell footage and the animal services file, in the first days, before anything gets erased. We identify every policy that might apply, including homeowner’s, renter’s and umbrella coverage, meaning a separate policy that pays once a home or auto policy’s limits run out. We also get the treating doctor’s written view on future care. Then we put a demand to the insurer, and if the insurer won’t pay what the claim is worth, we file suit in the 1st JDC before the deadline.
You’ll see our fee agreement in writing before you decide anything.
Our Shreveport office is at 509 Milam St, and we sit down with people from Highland, Broadmoor, Southern Hills and Cedar Grove, and from Bossier City, Blanchard and Keithville. If getting to the office isn’t practical, the first conversation works by phone. A call or a message from your phone is enough to start.
