We'll now talk about the third case listed in Mishnah Dalet (fourth) of the first Perek (chapter). We mentioned there all the different types of situations involving an animal that's mu'ad, an animal that a person has to pay nezek shalem (full damages) for. The third one we mentioned was an animal that starts off as tam, but through doing keren damage with its horns or using its body in an unusual way to damage, it becomes mu'ad by doing that three times. Three unusual damages make it mu'ad. We'll elaborate on that in this Mishnah.
Mishnah says: What animal is a tam animal, and what animal is a mu'ad animal? A mu'ad animal is an animal that did keren, keren damage, unusual damage, three different times, but it has to be on three different days. If it's three times on the same day, according to this opinion, it would not be considered mu'ad. Maybe it's having a bad day. Maybe that day the animal is doing something wrong, but there's no establishment of a pattern over here. So it has to be on three separate days. It doesn't have to be on three days in a row, but it has to be on three opportunities that it had consecutively. It could be a few days apart, without an opportunity to damage in between that it didn't take up. In other words, it has to use three opportunities to damage three times in a row on three different days. But if it has one opportunity where it could damage and it doesn't, in that situation we would say it's not considered a mu'ad animal because it passed up on keren damage.
A mu'ad animal, after it's established as mu'ad, goes back to being tam after it changes its behavior on three different days. In other words, it has the chance to do a similar type of keren damage on three different days, but it holds back. Once it holds back three times in a row without damaging at all, that's a cycle of three, so it's undoing the mu'ad status it had. If you know the laws of Vestot (menstrual cycles), it has a very similar pattern to that. This is the opinion of Rabbi Yehuda.
Rabbi Meir says: According to Rabbi Meir, a mu'ad animal is mu'ad once the owner was warned about the keren damage three times. What we're implying here is that we don't care whether the three keren damages were on three separate days. Rabbi Meir says that if the animal could become mu'ad by causing damage on three separate days, how much more so could an animal become mu'ad if it did it three times in one day? And that's his logic: even if it does it three times in one day, then it would be mu'ad. And of course, it would also be mu'ad if it happened, like the other opinion says, on three separate days.
Ve'tam sheyihyu hatinokot memashmeshin bo ve'eino noge'ach. And a mu'ad animal goes back to being tam if it's so relaxed and so tame and so not damaging that little kids would go over, touch it and play with it, and it would not hurt them. The opinion here of Rabbi Meir is that an animal holding back from hurting for three days, when it has the opportunity to hurt, is not enough. That's not enough of a reason to change the status of a mu'ad animal back to a tam animal. The only way that a mu'ad animal could go back to being a tam animal is if it's super, super relaxed, and we're so sure of it that little kids would go over, play with it and pull it, and it wouldn't damage them.