An ‘archaic’ law has left a Queensland biker out of pocket and suffering from long-term pain and discomfort after a collision with a stray cow caused him to crash his motorcycle.
The Guardian reports that the incident happened in Kingaroy, and that he impacted the bovine at around 60mph throwing him between 12-to-13 metres further down the road. The crash happened in 2012, and despite the passing of time, Steven Hadley claims the injuries sustained persist to this day. “It causes me discomfort all through the day, every day. All the time,” he said. “If I could get surgery and get it better I’d do it in a heartbeat. I just can’t afford to stop working. And I’m not the reason it happened; it was the cow’s fault, it came out in front of me.”
Injury aside, the crash has also left Mr Hadley out of pocket, as a ruling dating back more than 300 years means the animal's rightful owner is not responsible for any damages. Queensland and the Northern Territory are the only remaining regions where the law remains in place, having been repealed in every other part of the country over the years.
The Guardian reports that regardless of how badly injured Hadley had been (including if he’d been killed in the crash), neither the landowner nor the legal owner of the animal can be held responsible for the crash. In the eyes of the law (in that territory at least) Mr Hadley was at fault and the liability falls to him.
Interestingly, this isn’t a situation that should occur here in the UK - if an animal’s owner (or the landowner if the animal was being kept on rented land) is negligent and the animal strays onto a road causing a crash, any costs and damages would fall to them, or jointly the landowner and the animal owner should the creature have been kept on rented land.
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Without any compensation in this case, though, Mr Hadley revealed to The Guardian that he is simply “working through the pain”.
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