Horse Agistment

Horse agistment is when a horse owner keeps their horse on land owned by someone else, for a fee.

The terms, facilities and services of horse agistments vary widely.

Whether you are agisting someone's horses on your land or agisting your own horse on someone else's land, there are some important things you should consider. These include the responsibilites of each party in the agistment agreement, terms and amount of fee payment and contigency plans for disease, illness or injury of the horse, and for emergencies such as fire or flood.

The Impounding of Livestock Act 1994 was amended in 2004 to provide the owner / manager of a property on which horses are agisted with the ability to apply a lien over an agisted horse to recover fees when fees are not paid. Information about this legislation can be found in the Horse Agistment Kit.

Horse Agistment Kit

A kit of information about agisting horses has been developed to help horse owners and land owners to agist horses responsibly and to reduce the likelihood of a dispute arising from misunderstanding. The kit is available to download below, or in hard copy or on CD ROM from the Customer Service Centre, phone 136 186.
To view the following PDF documents you will need a copy of the Adobe pdf reader available for free download from Adobe Acrobat (external link).

This kit includes:

A description of how the new horse agistment lien legislation works;

Liens for Agistment of Horses Agnote

A step-by-step guide on how to create a lien under the Impounding of Livestock Act

(PDF 20kb)

A sample Default Notice

(PDF 16kb)

A sample Newspaper Notice

(PDF 9kb)

Guidelines for creating a written agistment agreement;

Agistment Contracts for Horses Agnote

A sample basic written agistment agreement

(PDF 15kb)

Information sheets for horse agistment situations: Code of Practice for the Welfare of Horses Condition Scoring of Horses Small Farms- Grazing Management Small Farms - Feeding Horses Horses and Bushfires. (PDF 17kb) Note that a person using the above information should conduct independent enquiries to verify its accuracy, and its application to him or her. To order free brochures on the horse agistment lien legislation, contact Naomi Pearson, Bureau of Animal Welfare, on 9217 4200. The horse industry has produced more detailed guidelines for using agistment agreements. This document can be found at Australian Horse Industry Council (external link) under "Contacts and Links" and then "General Horse Industry Information". For agistment agreements for the racing industry, contact Racing Victoria Ltd on (03) 9258 4258 or Harness Racing Victoria on (03) 9375 4255. For more information see Horses on this website.

Disclaimer
This publication may be of assistance to you, but the State of Victoria and its employees do not guarantee that the publication is without flaw of any kind or is wholly appropriate for your particular purposes and therefore disclaims all liability for any error, loss or other consequences which may arise from you relying on any information in this publication.

This publication is a guide only, it does not replace the Impounding of Livestock Act 1994 or other Acts and subordinate legislation applying to, or affecting the agistment of horses. Copies of the Act and Regulations are available from Information Victoria located at 356 Collins Street, Melbourne 3000 (telephone 1300 366 356 or at www.information.vic.gov.au). It is a summary of the law at the time of publication and cannot be used as a defence in court. Laws change from time to time. It is your responsibility to ensure that you are acting within the law.