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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 125 > Issue 3 (2026)

 

Abstract

American courts treat tortiously killed or injured dogs as discrete units of property when calculating damages awards for their owners. In doing so, judges rely on tort doctrines developed for family pets and livestock, which all assume that the animal’s economic value inheres in the animal itself. This Note argues that this “discrete-asset assumption” cannot fully capture value in cases involving dogs whose economic value arises from an enterprise jointly created by the dog and its owner, rather than from the dog alone. This Note contrasts traditional income-producing dogs, whose value is derived from their services or pedigree, with modern pet-influencers, whose commercial value stems from online engagement and is relational, non-fungible, and coproduced with its owner. The damages-analysis valuation methods used by courts for centuries fail to capture the value of pets that generate income through social media. Without a workable framework for valuing tortiously killed or injured pet influencers, courts risk either systematically undercompensating these dogs’ owners or resorting to doctrinal workarounds that could set destabilizing and undesirable precedent.

To address these risks, this Note proposes a targeted adjustment to the existing valuation doctrine. In this “synthetic value” approach, the dog is still considered injured property, but courts can account for documented enterprise loss in cases where a dog’s economic value is tied to the social media enterprise created with the owner. This Note then proposes a practical framework that courts can use to assess documented income, enterprise longevity, relational non-fungibility, and mitigation. By moving beyond the discrete-asset assumption for a narrow subset of modern income-producing dogs, this Note offers a doctrinally grounded method for valuing the destruction of a pet-influencer enterprise.

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