Rockville, Maryland: “A Montgomery County jury has rejected a negligence lawsuit brought by a woman who claimed she was attacked by a Canada goose while at a shopping center in 2004, causing her to fall and break her hip.” Suzanne Webster’s attorney said “the store made the situation worse by letting employees feed the geese.” (AP/WJZ.com, Dec. 10).
3 Comments
Geese are aggressive. Geese will take advantage of any opening you give them. You have to establish your dominance early, and uphold it often when dealing with geese. But do we teach people that?
Can’t do that because nature is a benign place, all full of love and happiness. Certain people should try breeding hamster as a livelihood.
There are a lot of cruelty-free strategies that the company could have used to discourage the geese from making a home in a place with so much contact with humans. They clearly looked the other way because they enjoyed having the geese there. I was surprised that the jurors in this case felt there was nothing the store could have done because the birds are wild animals…there’s a whole industry built on controlling wild pests!
-Elana
http://www.bird-x.com
[…] Last year we covered the unsuccessful suit against Contemporary Watercrafters, a Rockville, Md.-based pool maintenance business. It’s getting some more attention now as one of the entries in the U.S. Chamber’s Faces of Lawsuit Abuse campaign (careful, it auto-plays video with sound). Angle we didn’t mention in our earlier post: the owner was annoyed at the mess made by the geese and approached the Humane Society about removal but was told “it was a no-go — the Migratory Species Act forbade him from moving or disturbing the geese. All he could do was wait for their goslings to hatch and hope they then moved on of their own free will. The store put up tape around the area and signs warning passersby of the terrible geese threat.” (On the Record (Md. Daily Record blog), Dec. 9). […]