Racehorse’s ill health sparks a three-year courtroom battle

A HORSEWOMAN and an equestrian couple are locked in a £420,000 court battle over a thoroughbred foal whose ability to race was hampered by ill health.

Horse breeder Karen Watson found her £120,000 foal Sidney was ill with a chest infection after being in the care of Yorkshire stud farm owners Stephen and Josephine Knowles in 2010.

Miss Watson had harboured high hopes for Sidney’s prospects as a future racehorse.

But after he came home from the Knowles’ Beechwood Grange Stud, near York, in June 2010, they found that he was suffering from a serious chest infection known as the “rattles” which has reduced his value as a prospective track star to zero, she says.

She is now suing for the loss of Sidney’s estimated £120,000 value. The court heard Sidney was born at Beechwood Grange in April 2010.

Sidney’s sisters from the same parents had fetched £120,000 apiece, she says, and Miss Watson, who keeps horses on her own land at Broughton Farm, near Thirsk, North Yorkshire, expected a similar return on Sidney.

The horsewoman says alarm bells rang when Sidney and his mother were first delivered home and he was found to be “coughing.” Urgent veterinary advice was sought and he was treated with powerful antibiotics, but Miss Watson says the damage had already been done, and while Sidney is now much loved as a pet, his value as a potential race horse has been wiped out.

Mr and Mrs Knowles deny any responsibility for Sidney’s illness and were exonerated by a county court judge in 2014. But Miss Watson has now succeeded in overturning that ruling at the Court of Appeal.

After three years of courtroom battles, racking up lawyers’ bills which Miss Watson estimates will reach £300,000, the case will now be re-tried with the loser set to take a huge financial hit.

London’s Appeal Court heard when Sidney first fell ill, he was displaying symptoms of diarrhoea and a raised temperature of 102 degrees.

Lord Justice Jackson said that Mr and Mrs Knowles did not tell the vet who attended the foal about the high temperature he was running. And the vet went on to treat Sidney for a stomach upset, rather than looking for a more serious ailment.

Lord Justice Jackson, allowing her appeal, said: “Sidney contracted rattles in the first few weeks of his life while at Beechwood Grange Stud. That was not the fault of the stud, which maintains proper standards of hygiene.

“But the judge fell into error in his ruling that Mrs and Mrs Knowles had no duty to inform the vet of Sidney’s elevated temperature. He ought to have held that Beechwood Grange Stud was under a duty to lay the relevant facts before the vet. They ought to have appreciated that Sidney’s temperature was an important matter. The elevated temperature was an indication that the matter was more serious than a stomach upset.

A reasonably competent stud farm owner would be under a duty to place before the vet all material facts of which the stud farm owner was aware. The appeal will be allowed and the judgment set aside. The case will be remitted to Leeds County Court for a retrial,” the judge concluded.

Miss Watson said outside court that, despite his health troubles, Sidney is an extremely popular pet amongst her friends and family.

“Sidney contracted rattles in the first weeks of his life. Lord Justice Jackson, allowing her appeal