Landlords Beware of Tenants’ Wild Pet Animals, Court Says

The screeching, howling, cooing, thumping and bumping emanating from a neighbor’s apartment in Pacific Beach had provoked Angela Jendralski’s curiosity.

Her questions were answered--with a vengeance--one day in June, 1979. Invited in by the noisy neighbors, Jendralski was attacked by their pet monkey, one of a menagerie of birds and animals that filled the unkempt rooms.

The clerk-typist suffered serious hand injuries in the attack, and, her lawyer says, continues to suffer pain more than six years later.

On Wednesday, the 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego gave her new hopes of gaining compensation for her losses.

A three-judge panel of the court voted 2-1 to order a new trial in Jendralski’s civil suit against the landlord of the apartment complex, setting aside the results of a 1983 trial in San Diego County Superior Court.

Attorneys say the ruling established a new precedent in California law, holding for the first time that a landlord may be liable for injuries caused by wild animals kept as pets by his tenants, whether or not the landlord knows of the animals’ presence.

Case law in California previously held that financial responsibility extended only to a landlord who knew in advance that a tenant had a potentially dangerous pet, said Michael Anello, the attorney for landlord John Gil, one of the defendants in the case.

The new precedent may create weighty responsibilities for landlords, Anello said. They could be expected, for instance, to inspect tenants’ premises--an obligation that could invade tenants’ privacy and conflict with the strict limits on snooping imposed by landlord-tenant law, he said.

Appeal Court Justice Don Work, writing for himself and Justice Robert Staniforth, said the monkey attack departed from earlier cases, in which landlords were held to not be responsible for injuries caused by their tenants’ domestic pets.

Even a careful landlord who inspected his tenants’ apartments would not be likely to suspect that a pet dog would later cause anyone harm, Work reasoned.

But in the case of the monkey, he wrote, “if the landlord ‘inspected’ the (tenant’s) premises by merely knocking on the door and inquiring, he would have been immediately put on notice of the dangerous condition.”

So the landlord, Work ruled, is obliged to exercise “reasonable care” to protect his tenants from wild animals, or else face the consequences in court.

The ruling said Superior Court Judge Franklin Orfield erred in instructing the jury in Jendralski’s case that the landlord could only be liable if he knew his tenants were maintaining a dangerous animal.

Justice Edward Butler dissented from the Appeal Court ruling, saying the proper grounds for establishing a landlord’s liability is his knowledge of the danger posed by a tenant’s pet--not whether the pet is domesticated or wild.

The monkey’s owners, Stephanie and Caesar O’Campo, were not defendants in the trial because they moved from the apartment soon after the attack on Jendralski and could not be found, according to Teresa Williams, a lawyer for Jendralski in Santa Monica.

Jendralski, who moved to the Midwest after the incident, still is hampered by the injuries, Williams said. “She can work, but it’s painful,” the lawyer said.

While Anello said the ruling could mean new headaches for landlords, he added that the extent of the added burden is unlikely to be too extensive.

“I can’t conceive of many cases in which a landlord would be accused of harboring a wild animal,” he said.