If you go to the zoo, you probably think you’re going to have a great time. Maybe you’re going with your family, and you have some kids who eagerly await seeing their favorite animals. Perhaps you’re going on a date with a romantic interest.
If you hurt yourself at the zoo, though, you’ll need to figure out what you should do next from a legal standpoint. You might consider filing a lawsuit following a zoo-related injury, but only if it makes sense to do so.
In this article, we’ll talk about some considerations that usually come into play with zoo-related injuries.
Did You Cause the Injury Yourself?
First, you’ll need to think about whether you caused the injury yourself. You can probably think of many ways you might injure yourself at the zoo.
For instance, maybe you’re wearing a hat, and it falls off into a dry moat that separates the zoo visitors from one of the animal exhibits. You want your hat back, so you climb down into the moat. You fall and sprain your ankle.
In that situation, you’ve sustained an unfortunate injury, but you probably can’t sue the zoo and expect to get any money out of the lawsuit. The zoo likely posted signs saying that you shouldn’t climb down into the moat. You did it anyway, so you can only blame yourself.
If there’s a situation where you might argue that you can blame the zoo for your injury, at least in part, then you might still decide to sue. If it’s clear that you caused the injury yourself, though, then filing a lawsuit makes little sense.
Can You Blame the Zoo in a General Sense?
Maybe there’s a situation where you feel the zoo caused your injury. For instance, an animal breaks out of its enclosure and attacks you, injuring you. Later, when you look at the incident, it becomes clear that the zoo’s enclosure couldn’t safely contain the animal.
This design flaw caused your injury. If you can prove that, or if you can provide enough anecdotal evidence that strongly backs up that viewpoint, then it probably makes sense that you sue the zoo as a general entity. You’re suing the zoo itself and not a particular individual.
Can You Blame One Specific Employee?
However, you might also run into a situation sometimes where you hurt yourself at the zoo, but you can blame a particular individual’s actions and not the zoo as an entity. For instance, maybe there’s a zookeeper who leaves the door of an enclosure unlocked. An animal gets out and attacks you, injuring you.
In that situation, you might try to prove that this individual acted negligently. Maybe they knew the procedure that they needed to follow to lock the door when they left that animal enclosure. However, they forget to do it or didn’t do it for some other reason.
If you can prove that, then it establishes that this individual acted negligently. They owed you a duty of care, and they didn’t provide it.
If so, you can probably prove their guilt relatively easily if you elect to file a lawsuit. If you have both economic damages and non-economic ones after this animal attack, then suing the responsible party probably makes sense.
It’s pretty likely that you’ll want both non-economic as well as economic damages in this situation since you might very well have PTSD after the incident. Maybe you will have a hard time getting past what happened psychologically. That should significantly increase the amount of money in damages that you attempt to obtain from the responsible party.
Can You Produce Material Evidence of What You Say Occurred?
There’s something else you need to consider, though. You might feel certain that the zoo in general or one of its specific employees caused your injuries. Maybe you will have a hard time proving it, though.
Let us again go back to a scenario where an animal gets loose from its enclosure and attacks you, injuring you. You feel certain that you did nothing wrong. It follows that you should blame the zoo and try to get some money from them to recoup your economic losses and cover your non-economic damages.
However, it’s not immediately clear how the animal got out. To prove the zoo or any of its employees acted negligently, you might have to produce some physical evidence that establishes that fact.
If you can’t find a video or photos that show how the animal got out, then you can’t use those to convince a jury. Maybe you don’t have any eyewitnesses who saw how the animal got loose, either.
Since your injuries provide obvious evidence that the zoo didn’t restrain the animal appropriately, then you can probably win your lawsuit. The lack of an obvious chain of evidence that shows precisely what happened will likely complicate matters a bit, though.
Will You Eventually Recover?
There’s one additional factor that you will need to think about as you consider pursuing a lawsuit following your zoo-related injury. You need to think about whether you sustained only minor injuries or whether you’ll never get completely back to your old self again.
If you sustained only minor injuries from whatever took place at the zoo, and you have no out-of-pocket expenses or minimal ones, then you might feel that it’s not worth filing a personal injury lawsuit. Such lawsuits take time and energy, and if you will recover shortly without any monetary expenditure, you might feel that it’s simply not worth it. If it’s obvious that you will have life-changing injuries from this incident, though, then it’s certainly worth pursuing a lawsuit if you feel that you can blame the zoo or one of its employees.
You must think carefully about all of this when you’re considering filing a personal injury lawsuit after a zoo-related injury. Consulting with a lawyer with expertise in this niche definitely makes sense.