An editorial from The Herald-Dispatch
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — On March 31, 2014, a pit bull injured his 8-year-old neighbor as a group of children and the dog were playing with a ball in Wayne County.
The child received five stitches to his upper lip and nine to his lower lip to close the cuts.
Last week, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ruled in a divided – and complicated -decision that a lower court erred in ordering the dog to be destroyed. But the case still leaves many questions about how dog-bite cases should be handled going forward.
Although fatal dog attacks are fairly rare, bite incidents are not – the Center for Disease Control estimates there are more than 4 million a year in the United States. But liability issues and whether attacks should lead to putting the animal down vary from state to state and case to case…