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"Were you aware that at the time of this accident there existed an item of readily available, easy-to-fit safety equipment that would have lessened or perhaps even prevented this injury?" When one answers "yes: to this question the lawsuit is fundamentally over because the next question is going to be, "Why was this piece of equipment not used or unavailable?"(Jan Dawson) .
This is the kind of case that lawyers pray for. To prevent all of this it is just as easy to put a helmet on the little wranglers and go for a nice safe ride. If a rider needs persuasion to put on a helmet before a ride, Canadians have the idea. On June 29, 2001, Queen Elizabeth II passed a royal bill that stated that riders under the age of eighteen have to wear a helmet, by law. Also, riders have to wear the appropriate foot wear and have safety stirrups, while in Ontario. Equine establishments are required to rent helmets and footwear, or to have them on hand for a "just in case" situation. The law went into effect at the end of September, and is punishable by jail time or a $5,000 fine. This law is enforced by the Ontario Equestrian Federation (Dawson).
Each year, traumatic brain injury is associated with 52,000 deaths in the United States. It accounts for one third of all injury deaths in the United states. Approximately 80,000 people who survive traumatic brain injury will be dealing with some loss of function during their healing process. In the 1990's, horseback riding was the leading cause of brain injury in the state of Oklahoma. There were 109 traumatic brain injuries due to riding, three resulted in death (Alexander). .
The studies showed that the brain injuries were disbursed evenly across the gender and age barriers. There were fifty-five females and fifty-four males injured, and the ages were from three years old to seventy-one years, the median age was around thirty years old. The most common times for brain injury were the spring and summer months, not fall and winter, with nearly half the accidents occurring on either Saturday or Sunday.
