Equine Activity Statutes – Part 2: Inherent Risk of Equine Activity

This post is one piece of a 3-part series on Equine Activity Statutes. Make sure you’ve read Part 1 before continuing.

The next often litigated question in cases which invoke the equine activity statute is whether the injury was caused by an “inherent risk of equine activity”. Even when the defendant is considered an “equine sponsor/professional” and the injured party is a “participant”, if the injury was not caused by an “inherent risk of equine activity”, the equine activity statute will not apply, and the sponsor/professional is left unprotected.

An “inherent risk of equine activity” typically includes dangers or conditions which are an integral part of equine activities.

In some cases, when the injured party demonstrates that the injury occurred because of the equine sponsor/professional’s negligence, rather than an inherent risk of equine activity, courts are not so quick to provide immunity to the equine sponsor/professional.

In one such case, a man was severely injured while participating in a guided trail ride. The stable’s employee who guided the ride was originally hired as a food server and had never led a trail ride before. According to the employee, however, she had “ridden horses all her life”. During the trail ride, the guide allowed another participant to run her horse on several occasions. And, on one such occasion, the man’s horse followed.

The man was unable to stop his horse, but when the other participant’s horse abruptly stopped so did the man’s horse, causing the man to fall off sideways on to his upper left chest. The following day, the man was sweaty and was in and out of consciousness, so he went to the hospital where he was found to have a ruptured spleen which needed removal. Shortly after the surgery, the man suffered a stroke and suffered from vision impairment.

In this case, the stable unsuccessfully argued that because a horse running and stopping abruptly is an inherent risk of equine activity, the stable should be afforded protection by the state’s equine activity statute. The court determined that because allowing a food server to guide the ride and allowing participants to run their horses during the ride could be considered negligent, the stable was not granted protection by the equine activity statute and the case was allowed to proceed to trial. As many of these cases do, the matter ended with a pre-trial settlement agreement.

In other cases, courts have determined that a horse spooking from wildlife, a horse biting a participant, a horse spooking from a barking dog, a horse spooking from a loud sound of an opening gate, a horse spooking from a low flying helicopter, and a horse’s violent reaction to a bite from a fire ant to be “inherent risks of equine activity” which warranted dismissal of the case.