The wound heals. The reaction often does not, and it is the part of a dog attack claim most likely to go unrecorded and therefore unpaid.
What it actually looks like
Not always a diagnosis. Frequently a set of changes people do not connect to the attack until someone asks:
- Avoiding the street, park, or route where it happened
- Crossing the road at the sight of any dog
- Declining invitations to homes with dogs
- Sleep disruption, or nightmares
- Hypervigilance — scanning, flinching at barking
- A child who will not play outside, or who has regressed in sleep or toileting
- Irritability, or withdrawal, that the person does not attribute to the attack
Dog attacks are distinctive among injuries in this respect: the thing that hurt you is common, mobile, and unpredictable, and is present in ordinary daily life in a way that most accident causes are not. Avoidance is therefore expensive in a way it is not for, say, a fall from a ladder.
Why it gets left out
Nobody writes it down. Physical injuries generate paper automatically. Psychological effects generate none unless someone seeks treatment or keeps a record.
People minimise it. “I’m fine, it’s just a scar” is the most common thing we hear, from adults in particular. It is also frequently not accurate six months on.
Children cannot report it. A four-year-old does not say they are experiencing avoidance. They say they do not want to go to the park. The parent has to notice and record it. Children’s claims are valued differently and this is a large part of why.
How to document it
Get treatment if you need it. This matters for its own sake first. It also creates the record — a therapist’s notes are evidence in a way self-report is not.
Tell the treating clinician. Mentioning sleep or anxiety at a wound-check appointment puts it in the medical record at the right date.
Keep a dated log. What was avoided, what was declined, what changed, what a child did differently. Written contemporaneously it carries weight; the expense tracker has a section for exactly this.
Note the specific losses. A route no longer walked. Exercise stopped. A dog the family rehomed. Those are concrete and they are attributable.
Where it sits in the claim
Under § 767.04 liability is established by the bite. Psychological harm is part of the damages flowing from it, alongside medical cost and physical pain, and it does not require a separate legal theory.
It does require evidence. An undocumented psychological injury is not valued as a modest one — it is very often valued as nothing, because there is nothing in the file to value.