Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California

Re: who should pay?

$5,000.00 is outrageous. What did the vet do? The owner of the dog should be responsible for the bill, but its amount is too much. Good luck.

Re: who should pay?

I'm sorry to hear about your son's loss, though I can't say I agree with Mr. Iadevaia that the bill was outrageous since I don't know what the vet did. $5,000 might be a perfectly fair price for the type of services he performed, especially if she was hospitalized for three days. (Your question does not say whether she stayed in the ER for that time or was sent home.)

As the dog's owners, your son and his wife presumptively responsible for paying for the reasonable value of the vet's services. They would clearly be responsible if the dog had become ill while in their care; despite appearances, the fact that the dog was being cared for by others may have been unrelated to her death.

The brother-in-law might be on the hook if he should have realized that the dog was in danger but made her exercise anyway, but I don't think a typical healthy 5-year-old Lab would have serious problems with just 10 minutes of exercise even in that kind of heat, or that a non-expert should have anticipated such problems. Making the dog exercise in that heat was dumb but not necessarily so dumb that this outcome was foreseeable.

It is also possible that the dog's demise was not caused by the exercise at all, especially since some time seems to have passed before she needed treatment and since three more days passed before she died. The sustained heatwave might have overwhelmed her system even if she hadn't gone running.

The fact that the parents were caring for the dog at the time is not enough by itself to make them responsible for the independent actions of their adult son. They should only be held responsible if something they did caused the dog's illness or death or, alternatively, if: (a) the exercise caused the dog's illness and death; AND (b) they should have known this might happen if the dog exercised in those conditions AND (c); they either told the brother to exercise the dog or should have known that he was going to do this on his own.