Daily Archives: October 18, 2003

You can be fairly confident that the animal rights activist who released thousands of minks and thus disaster — see The Fur Flies and Crawls and Bites — was not a lawyer. Just about every law student learns from Foster vs Preston Mill Co, 268 P.2d 645 (Wa. 1954), that minks eat their young when upset.

The Foster case's facts are at least as strange as the Washington Post article. The defendant was blasting to clear some land two+ miles away from a mink farm. The noise upset the minks, they started eating their young, plaintiff lost a bundle. The court held that because blasting is an ultrahazardous activity, the defendant was strictly liable for whatever harms it caused, however weird and unpredictable they might be. Once the class was duly outraged, our Torts professor managed to suggest that this is a predictable behavior among minks, so the issue is who has a duty to find out what local conditions are (how predictable are mink farms?), and it got more convoluted from there.

No one having had the experience of Foster, however, would be likely to turn minks loose on the world. But I've always thought it might be fun to teach Torts.

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