A bite to the face is not a worse version of a bite to the arm. It is a different claim, and the difference is not sentiment — it is that the injury is permanently visible, the treatment runs for years, and the person bitten is usually very small.
Why the face
Height and posture. A child approaches a dog face to face, at the dog’s eye level, often leaning in. An adult’s forearm comes up between the dog and their head; a four-year-old’s does not.
The result is a consistent pattern: cheeks, lips, nose, the area around the eyes, ears and scalp. These are also the areas with the least spare tissue and the most nerve and structural complexity underneath.
What the treatment actually involves
The initial repair is not the end. Facial wounds are frequently closed by a plastic surgeon rather than in a general emergency department, and even a good primary closure is a starting point.
Revision is staged, deliberately. Surgeons generally wait for a scar to mature before revising it, and for a growing child the face changes shape for years. A revision plan may run into adulthood — not because anything went wrong, but because that is how the reconstruction works.
Function as well as appearance. Near the eyelid, lip or nostril, a scar that contracts can affect how the feature moves and works. That is a functional injury, not a cosmetic one, and it is assessed separately.
Why photographs in the first days decide this
This is the part people cannot go back and fix.
A mature scar is a faint line. What it looked like open, on day one, is the evidence of what was actually done — and once it has healed, no expert can reconstruct it. Claims involving serious facial injuries are routinely weakened by having nothing from the first week.
Photograph in good light, from several angles, with something for scale, and again each day for a week. Keep the originals with their timestamps. Do not crop or filter them.
What gets valued
Beyond medical costs and future surgery:
- Permanent visible disfigurement, assessed separately from treatment cost
- Functional impairment where a feature’s movement is affected
- Psychological effect, which for a visible facial injury is frequently the largest component and is often left undocumented — get it into a medical record
- A child’s whole horizon rather than a few years of it
There is no formula here and anyone offering one is guessing. What actually drives value.
The Florida specifics
Liability runs under § 767.04 — the owner is liable from the first bite, and the dog’s history is irrelevant.
Two provisions matter more than usual here. If the person bitten was under six, the “Bad Dog” sign defence does not apply to them at all — which is the age group facial bites concentrate in. And a bite severe enough to leave a significant facial wound may cross the confiscation threshold, which since 2025 is measured on a graded bite-severity scale — so how the wound is described in the medical record has consequences beyond your own care.
Do not settle early
A facial claim settled before the revision plan is known is settled against an unknown. The surgeon’s view of what will be needed over the next several years is the single most important document in the file, and it does not exist in week one.