WILD AND DANGEKOUS ANIMALS. 375 



In the case of Ellis v. Loftus Iron Co. already cited/ it was 

 held that where the defendants' horse injured the plaintiff's 

 mare by biting and kicking through a fence, this was a tres- 

 pass for which the defendants were liable apart from any ques- 

 tion of negligence. The following remarks have been made 

 on this case : "The more doubtful question appears to be 

 whether, in the absence of negligence or default, the owner 

 is liable in trespass for the acts of his animal. We have some 

 difficulty about the principle of this liability. It can hardly 

 be put on the ground of agency without an approach to the 

 ludicrous and yet, strictly, if trespass lies, it would seem log- 

 ically that it must be a case of qui facit per alium facit per se. 

 The animal has a will of its own. ... If my dog, roving 

 about on a third person's ground, bite another, I am only 

 liable if there be evidence of the scienter; but suppose my dog 

 strays off my ground on to my neighbor's and bites my 

 neighbor there, how then? Wherein does this case differ 

 from the case of a horse kicking through a fence? . . . 

 Where is the connection between the trespass to the land and 

 the damage to the mare? The former was per se a triviality; 

 the latter was the serious question. . . . There is — or, at any 

 rate, in many cases, there may be — no essential, bvit only an 

 accidental connection between the trespass to the land and 

 the damage to the chattel or the person on the land. If a 

 man enters my land, tears my coat and breaks my head, it is 

 not a proper statement of it that he entered my land, whereby 

 he tore my coat and broke my head: there are two distinct 

 trespasses, one to the land, the other to the goods or person. 

 If this be so, the ordinary rules applicable to the acts of arii- 

 mals, apart from ownership of the soil, ought to have been 

 applied to the damage to the mare. If so, negligence or de- 

 fault would seem to have been essential to the right to re- 

 cover. . . . We would . . . suggest that to the spontaneous 

 acts of animals the legal elements of trespass quare daustim- 



' L. R. 10 C. P. 10. See § 74; supra. 



