Veterinary malpractice and compensation for non-economic damages (Florence Court of Appeal, Dec. 23, 2025)

Veterinary professional liability: the legal framework

When discussing delayed veterinary diagnosis, the first point to clarify is that a veterinarian’s liability is not a “lesser” form of liability than a physician’s, nor does it follow autonomous rules outside the civil-law system. Rather, the relationship between the animal owner and the veterinarian is, for all intents and purposes, contractual in nature and based on the provision of qualified professional services.

This means that, in the veterinary context as well, liability is framed as contractual nonperformance, and the general rules governing professional obligations apply. The veterinarian does not guarantee the animal’s recovery, but must perform with the heightened professional standard of care required by the nature of the engagement, tailoring the diagnostic pathway to the concrete clinical presentation and to the scientific knowledge available at the time.

In matters of diagnosis, this duty is central. Diagnosis is not an ancillary phase of treatment; it is its necessary premise. A diagnostic error or delay can affect not only the effectiveness of therapy, but also the very possibility of alleviating the animal’s suffering or timely planning alternative courses of care. For that reason, courts scrutinize cases in which the professional omits necessary testing or persists in ineffective treatments while neglecting diagnostic investigations that medical science makes available and appropriate.

From this standpoint, veterinary liability closely resembles medical malpractice liability, especially in cases — like the one at issue — where the delayed diagnosis concerns serious, rapidly evolving, and potentially debilitating conditions. Even if the ultimate outcome is unfavorable, what matters is the loss of clinically meaningful time during which the animal could have received different, more appropriate, or simply less painful care.

In assessing liability, the judge does not merely ask whether the veterinarian was “wrong” in an abstract sense. The inquiry is whether the diagnostic workup was consistent with accepted professional standards, whether omitted tests were reasonably required, and whether the professional correctly read and interpreted the available clinical signs. In other words, the assessment focuses on the soundness of the method before the result.

This framework must also be read against a broader legal backdrop that has changed markedly in recent years in Italy. The legal system no longer treats companion animals simply as “things,” but increasingly recognizes their welfare and the relationship with their owners. That evolution emerges from a coordinated reading of multiple provisions, including:

• Law No. 281 of August 14, 1991 (companion animals);
• Law No. 189 of July 20, 2004 (criminalizing and repressing animal cruelty);
• the amended final paragraph of Article 1138 of the Civil Code (condominium bylaws);
• Law No. 82 of June 6, 2025 (increasing penalties for crimes against animals);
• and the European Convention for the Protection of Pet Animals, ratified in Italy by Law No. 201 of November 4, 2010.

This legal framework does not automatically turn every veterinary error into a compensable wrong. It does, however, affect how professional performance is evaluated, reinforcing the idea that veterinary care implicates interests the legal system increasingly deems worthy of protection. It is within this space that liability for delayed diagnosis is situated — not as an exception, but as a coherent application of civil-law principles to a professional field now fully recognized.

Once the prerequisites for liability are established, the decisive issue remains: what types of damages are recoverable when a veterinarian misdiagnoses a condition — particularly whether, alongside economic losses, the legal system can also protect non-economic harm tied to the owner’s relationship with the animal.

The owner’s suffering as compensable harm

In veterinary malpractice cases, the first form of harm typically considered is economic loss. It is the most immediate category and often the easiest to prove. It includes expenses for treatment, the costs of unnecessary or repeated tests, and sums spent in pursuit of alternative therapies later found to be unnecessary. In some cases, courts may also consider the animal’s market value, though that approach is increasingly viewed as inadequate.

Economic loss, however, does not capture what actually occurs when a delayed diagnosis compromises the health of a companion animal. In the most serious cases, it reflects only a marginal part of the overall harm, leaving unaddressed the anguish over avoidable suffering, the premature loss of daily companionship, and the distress stemming from the awareness that the lost time could have been different. That gap makes non-economic damages central.

For a long time, article 2059 of the Italian Civil Code was construed narrowly, limiting compensation for non-economic damages to situations expressly provided by law — particularly where the underlying conduct also constituted a crime. Under that view, contractual breach could not give rise to non-economic damages.

The framework changed with the development of Supreme Court jurisprudence and, decisively, with the Joint Sections’ decision of November 11, 2008, No. 26972. Since then, a now-settled principle has emerged: non-economic damages may be awarded in contractual matters where the breach infringes inviolable personal rights or constitutionally protected interests. Whether liability is contractual or tort-based becomes secondary to the nature of the protected interest harmed.

On that basis, case law identifies three reference criteria, such as the interest harmed must have constitutional relevance; the infringement must be serious, exceeding a minimum threshold of tolerability; and the harm must not be trivial — i.e., reducible to mere annoyances or inconveniences.

The Florence Court of Appeal relied on these premises. It adopted a constitutionally oriented interpretation of article 2059 of the Italian Civil Code, emphasizing article 2 of the Italian Constitution and its openness to protecting interests that emerge over time as expressions of the individual’s personality. From this perspective, the emotional bond with a companion animal is no longer treated as a legally irrelevant or merely subjective feeling, but as a legally meaningful interest, in light of the normative and social evolution that has progressively moved beyond treating animals as mere property.

Accordingly, the non-economic damage does not arise from the animal’s suffering per se, but from the direct harm suffered by the owner, in his own right (“iure proprio”). What matters is the pain caused by the premature loss of companionship, the anguish over avoidable suffering, and the awareness that a segment of shared life was taken away by professional nonperformance.

The Court also clarified that:

“The loss of even a limited period of time can constitute legally cognizable harm. In that sense, it stated (in substance) that the loss of a “segment of life” (measurable in months) is always appreciable damage, because life is legally protected even when the temporal extension is not substantial”.

This approach finds an analogy—albeit in a different area—in Italian case law on damages for the loss of a familial relationship, where even a death anticipated by a relatively short period is treated as a source of compensable harm for close relatives.

In this way, non-economic damages become the lens through which the entire dispute is understood: not an emotional add-on, but the legal instrument through which the system acknowledges that veterinary diagnostic error can affect profound interests not reducible to a purely economic dimension. On these premises, the Florence Court of Appeal applied the principles to the facts and proceeded to an equitable award.

How are non-economic damages calculated?

The Florence Court of Appeal fully reversed the first-instance judgment. After the Lucca Tribunal’s dismissal, the appellate court granted the owner’s appeal and, for the first time in the case, recognized the right to recover non-economic damages arising from delayed veterinary diagnosis.

The endpoint of the appeal was not only the abstract recognition that the owner’s suffering is compensable, but also its translation into a concrete award, which illustrates how this type of harm is evaluated and quantified in practice.

A decisive step in the reasoning concerns the findings of the court-appointed expert (CTU), the veterinarian appointed by the trial court. According to the expert, a timely diagnosis would have allowed the dog to live approximately three additional months and would have enabled a different clinical management that was less burdensome in terms of suffering. It is on this factual basis that the Court established causation between the diagnostic delay and the harm suffered by the owner.

The non-economic damages awarded do not coincide with the loss of the animal as such, nor with the total extinction of the emotional bond. The Court precisely defined the compensable injury as the specific portion of life and companionship that the diagnostic delay took away. In other words, the relevant harm was the loss of three months of companionship and daily shared life that, according to the expert findings, could have been lived.

On that basis, the Court made an equitable assessment of damages, rejecting the use of schedules or standardized criteria. The amount reflected multiple factors: the overall duration of the relationship with the animal, the intensity of the emotional bond, the avoidable suffering endured by the dog, the owner’s distress, and the economic and personal effort undertaken to pursue alternative treatments. At the same time, the court calibrated the award to the actual temporal scope of the harm proven.

Within this framework, the Court awarded €2,500 in non-economic damages. Considered in isolation, that sum might appear modest. However, when related to the three-month period affected by the diagnostic error, it represents a coherent outcome: it assigns legal value to the owner’s suffering without converting damages into an undifferentiated compensation for the loss of the animal.

The decision thus shows how the principle articulated above operates in practice: even the loss of a limited temporal segment can support an award of non-economic damages, provided it is proven and causally linked to the professional breach. The reversal of the first-instance judgment, therefore, did not depend on a different emotional appraisal of the events, but on a different — and more rigorous — legal analysis of compensable harm and the criteria for its equitable assessment.