Under the law of premises liability, a landowner has no duty to warn visitors of the dangers of indigenous wild animals. This rule has been applied in cases volving wasps and fireants.
Or maybe this is not a premises liability case? Does the fact that there was an employer-employee relationship impose additional duties on the employer? Or perhaps there is a statute unique to railroads that is not mentioned in the article?
Employers have a general duty to provide a safe workplace. It's statutory in Texas. But this employee worked for the railroad, so this was almost certainly a FELA case. FELA, as the S.Ct. affirmed just last year, does not use the traditional proximate cause standard of damages that applies in most tort cases. FELA makes railroads liable for injuries or death caused in whole or "in part" by the RR. Thus, RRs can be held liable if their negligence played any part, even a slight part, in the employee's injury or death. This is usually described in FELA cases as "slight cause," or, most often, "featherweight causation."
