Equine Law Blog

Horse trainers and their clients have every incentive to document their relationship with a contract. Horse owners could potentially bring a variety of legal challenges against the trainer, including:

Breach of contract

A lawsuit might claim that the trainer breached (broke) the terms of a contract by failing to properly train.

State “Good Samaritan laws” are generally designed to protect medical caregivers from lawsuits that arise from negligent acts as long as the caregivers have acted voluntarily (not for compensation) at the time of service. With some of the laws, liability only exists where the injured patient can prove that the defendant was grossly negligent.

Horse breeding transactions can generate several disputes, including the following:

Problem

The stallion’s show or race schedule prevents its availability for breeding by cooled semen or live cover.

If the breeding will be accomplished by live cover, AI, or shipped cooled semen, which requires the stallion to be available for collection, this problem can be avoided by a contract that specifies a range of dates or months in which the stallion can be available.

In a typical veterinary malpractice case, the plaintiff (the party suing the veterinarian) must retain a qualified expert witness in an attempt to prove that the veterinarian breached an applicable standard of care and that the breach, and not something else, caused the horse to be injured. Finding the right expert takes effort, and paying the right expert for his or her evaluation and time can be expensive.

In some cases, however, the facts are so compelling that courts have found that no expert witness is deemed necessary. Here are some of those cases:

Not every claim against a veterinarian is really a claim of veterinary malpractice. A small number of cases involving veterinarians are more appropriately brought as a claim of ordinary negligence on part of the veterinarian or the staff.