Definition
In legal contexts, "worry" is a term of art with a specific and narrow meaning distinct from its common usage. As applied to animals — particularly dogs — to worry means to chase, pursue, harass, bite, or attack another animal (or, in some usages, a person), especially in a repeated or sustained manner. The classic legal application involves a dog worrying livestock: harassing, biting, or mauling sheep, cattle, or other farm animals, whether or not the attack results in the animal's death.
This technical meaning underlies a substantial body of statutory law governing dog ownership, liability for animal damage, and the conditions under which a dog found worrying livestock may lawfully be killed. Many livestock protection statutes across common law jurisdictions have historically permitted — and some still permit — a landowner or farmer to destroy a dog caught in the act of worrying their animals without incurring civil or criminal liability for the destruction of property.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A strong feeling of anxiety; an instance or cause of such a feeling; a person who causes worry.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To harass by pursuit and barking; to attack repeatedly; to tear or mangle with the teeth; also, to harass or beset with importunity, or with care and anxiety; to vex, annoy, torment, or trouble.
The gap here is directional rather than absolute. The 1913 Webster's definition actually preserves the older physical and predatory sense — pursuing, tearing, mauling — that the law retained as a term of art. Modern common usage has shed that physical meaning almost entirely and shifted toward the purely psychological. A researcher encountering "worry" in a historical statute or case involving animals should not read it as expressing emotional distress; it almost certainly describes a physical act of harassment or attack.
Common Confusion
"Worry" in the livestock and dog-law context is sometimes misread through the lens of modern ordinary English, producing absurd results: courts or researchers occasionally treat language like "worrying sheep" as metaphor or hyperbole when it is in fact a precise behavioral description with legal consequences. The confusion compounds in historical sources, where the same page of a case or statute may use "worry" in both its physical-predatory sense (a dog worrying lambs) and its general anxious sense (the owner need not worry about liability if acting in defense of livestock). Context within animal law statutes is controlling.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in agricultural law, animal control history, tort liability for animal attacks, or rural property law will encounter "worry" as a functional legal term across centuries of common law material. Several considerations:
First, the term is highly time-sensitive in statutory interpretation. Pre-twentieth century livestock statutes routinely used "worry" as a defined or quasi-defined act triggering specific legal consequences — typically the right to kill the offending animal without liability. Later codifications sometimes replaced "worry" with more clinical language ("attack," "harass," "chase," "bite"), but many older statutes remain in force in amended form, and the older language persists.
Second, Anderson's entry on this term is embedded within a broader treatment of dog regulation — registration, collaring, running at large, destruction for violations. Researchers should understand that "worry" in this corpus functions as one point on a spectrum of regulated dog behavior, not as a standalone offense category. The Anderson material connects worrying to both the property status of dogs and the conditions under which that property status yields to the rights of livestock owners.
Third, jurisdictional variation in how "worry" is defined in livestock protection statutes is significant. Some statutes required actual physical contact; others extended the term to sustained pursuit or harassment even without biting. The distinction mattered for whether a farmer was justified in shooting a dog that was chasing but had not yet mauled the sheep.
Fourth, for researchers in tort history, the "worry" concept intersects with the strict liability rules applicable to known dangerous animals and the "one bite" rule debates. A dog with a known propensity to worry livestock was treated differently from a dog with no such history, and this history bears on modern dangerous dog liability frameworks.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law does not provide a discrete definition of "worry" as a standalone term; instead, the concept surfaces within Anderson's extended treatment of dog regulation as property and as subject to municipal and state control. Anderson emphasizes that dogs are things of value that may be stolen and that their regulation — including destruction for running at large or for dangerous behavior — is a valid exercise of police power. The "worry" concept is implicit in this framework: a dog that worries livestock has departed from the category of regulated-but-tolerated property into the category of destructible nuisance or danger.
Webster's 1913 is more useful here than most legal dictionaries because it preserves the physical, predatory meaning that courts of the period were applying. The Webster's definition — "to harass by pursuit and barking; to attack repeatedly; also, to tear or mangle with the teeth" — maps directly onto the legal usage found in livestock statutes and agricultural cases of the same era.
Historical legal dictionaries generally underserve this term. It was treated as sufficiently plain in meaning not to require formal definition, yet specialized enough in its agricultural-law application that general dictionaries capture it imperfectly. Researchers should look to the statutory text and case law of the jurisdiction in question rather than relying on dictionary authority alone.
Jurisdictional Note
The specific acts constituting "worry" vary by jurisdiction and by statutory era. English common law and early American agricultural statutes defined the term broadly enough to include sustained pursuit without contact; some modern livestock protection statutes have narrowed the concept to actual attack or injury. Researchers should not assume a uniform definition across jurisdictions or time periods.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Animals (for the full framework of dog regulation, livestock protection, and the property status of animals); Nuisance (for the related doctrine governing animals that disturb the peace or damage neighboring property).