564 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



Mr. Coon : You may be able to do it, but it would be a long- 

 drawn-out, hard proposition. As a practical matter it would be 

 a very hard job. 



Mr. Ames: Suppose that the stock was billed prior to the 

 time that the cattle are loaded, and the railroad receives that bill 

 and signs for it. 



Mr. Coon : That is a different situation, then. It is all a 

 question of fact in any particular claim as to whether or not the 

 railroad has accepted that live stock for transportation. If they 

 have issued a bill of lading for it or live stock contract, then, of 

 course, you have got better ground ft)r a claim ; but if the live 

 stock has simply been driven into the pen and no bill of lading 

 or live stock contract issued for it, and some of them get away 

 before they are put into the car, I believe you will have a hard 

 time supporting the claim. 



The President: Are there any other questions? 



Mr. Corrie : I have a daughter who was left a widow, and in 

 settling up the estate she sent a carload of cattle to the Sioux 

 City yards, entrusting her hired man to take them, and for some 

 reason lost the cattle in the yards. He was a sort of ignorant 

 fellow and didn't find the cattle until they had stood in the yards 

 from 2 o'clock in the morning until 5 o'clock in the evening, and 

 finally found them, and she made a claim for $150 for damage 

 and shrink, and so on, and I want to help her out on that, and I 

 don't know whether to go to the commission company or the rail- 

 road company or the stock yards. 



Mr. Coon : That suggests something that I wanted to talk 

 about. When a man accompanies the shipment, you have a dif- 

 ferent proposition ; the railroad is liable for its negligence, but it 

 shifts the burden of proof. If you are able to show that you 

 loaded seventy hogs into the car and no caretaker accompanied it, 

 and five of the hogs are dead, the burden of proof is on the rail- 

 road company to show that it was not negligent. In the other 

 case, if there are seventy hogs loaded into the car and a care- 

 taker accompanies them, then the burden of proof is on the 

 shipper to show that the act resulted from some negligence on the 

 part of the railroad. It is a harder case to make out a case of 

 negligence where the caretaker accompanies the car than where 

 he does not. You have got to prove negligence, instead of having it 

 presumed. It is up to you, since the caretaker accompanied the 

 shipment, to show the negligence on the part of the railroad. 



