TWENTY-FIRST ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 561 



A person or firm that does nothing else but handle railroad freight 

 claims is in position to give you information on how to get out of trouble 

 al'ter you have gotten in, and because of experience in procedure can prob- 

 ably obtain more for you on your claim than you can get yourself. Our 

 main service, however, is to try to keep you out of trouble, and not get 

 you into court. In other words, we try to do those things which will 

 tend to cut down the tremendous losses of dead and crippled animals that 

 are occurring at the present time. 



To this end, it might be well to bear in mind a few rules that might 

 be laid down to overcome these losses. In the first place, do not try 

 to get an unusual fill on your animals before loading. The man who fills 

 his hogs to the bursting point with swill or mash, usually, instead of get- 

 ting $15 a hundred for his swill, gets a few dollars for dead hogs and an 

 unusually heavy shrinkage at the other end of the line. In other words, 

 give your animals only an ordinary feed on corn, with a suflBlcient amount 

 of water, and it will pay you more in the end than to try to get them to 

 take on an unusual fill. 



In the second place, haul your hogs to the pen instead of driving 

 them. All of us know that the hog is the most susceptible animdl in the 

 world to suffocation and pneumonia after being overheated, and driving 

 them to the pen not only reduces their weight but lays them open to 

 pneumonia. 



In the third place, place your stock in the loading pens, with suffi- 

 cient time before loading to allow them to lie down and rest. In other 

 words, rushing them to the loading pens and then rushing them into the 

 car, with the liberal application of a 2x4 to hasten the loading, may ap- 

 parently have no effect upon them, but that is not the case. Deliver 

 them to the loading pens in time to give them a chance to cool off before 

 loading. 



Again, don't overload your cars. The man who tries to save three or 

 four dollars thru overloading his animals. Instead of saving a few dollars 

 usually finds himself with a few dead hogs and a claim on his hands, arid 

 a stale bunch of animals that sell at from fifty cents to a dollar discount. 

 Of course, this is not true of cattle, but when you overload a carload of 

 cattle and one happens to fall, they are so close together it can not get 

 up again and thSy trample it, and as a result you have a few cripples, 

 and a stale-looking bunch of animals that sell at a discount price. 



Fifth, don't put a bull or a vicious animal into the car loose with the 

 other animals. The vicious animal should be penned off by itself to pro- 

 tect the rest of the animals from injury. 



Then on mixed cars, see that a strong partition separates each kind 

 of animal from the other. If you could see some of the cars that arrive 

 at destination and see some of the supposedly secure partitions that have 

 been broken down, and different kinds of animals mixed together, you 

 v/ould see the wisdom of making secure the partitions you place in the 

 car. With the mixing up of different kinds of animals with hogs running 

 about under the feet of your cattle, or calves with the cattle, or cattle in 

 the hog pen, you can see how easy it is to swell the total of dead that 

 now exists. 



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