Marxen v. Meredith

69 N.W.2d 399, 246 Iowa 1173, 1955 Iowa Sup. LEXIS 419
CourtSupreme Court of Iowa
DecidedApril 5, 1955
Docket48660
StatusPublished
Cited by13 cases

This text of 69 N.W.2d 399 (Marxen v. Meredith) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Iowa primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Marxen v. Meredith, 69 N.W.2d 399, 246 Iowa 1173, 1955 Iowa Sup. LEXIS 419 (iowa 1955).

Opinion

*1175 Oliver, J.

Defendants Lloyd and Meredith operated a retail hardware and farm implement business at Atlantic, Iowa. Plaintiff farmed and raised hogs in that vicinity. June 3, 1949, defendants sold plaintiff a five-gallon can of hog spray. The man who made the spray and sold it to defendants testified for them he secured its ingredients from a gas plant ,and these were three parts coal tar and two parts drip oil which he mixed and poured into five-gallon cans.

Plaintiff testified defendant Meredith handled the sale of the spray to him. Meredith testified plaintiff told him “he had an awful nice bunch of hogs * * * and before he turned them out on pasture he thought he would spray them.” Plaintiff testified Meredith told him they had some good hog spray, “he sold a lot of it and guaranteed it.” He did not tell plaintiff the name of the spray, which was on the can. Plaintiff had never seen that kind of spray, did not know what it was and was told nothing about its ingredients. Meredith instructed plaintiff to apply it, full strength, with a sprinkling can, to place the hogs “in a close enough place so they could climb over each other and put it all over them.”

Plaintiff testified his hogs were well and in good condition, the pigs were worth $30 per head and the sows $160 per head. He placed about two hundred pigs and twenty sows in a ventilated hog house, and sprayed them with approximately one and one-half gallon of the spray. He then left the hog house to refill the sprinkling can. Five minutes later he returned and found almost all of the pigs lying on their sides, mouths open, kicking and trying to breathe. The sows were not down but were restless. Plaintiff turned them out of the hog house and, with the help of members of his family, dragged the pigs out into the open air. These persons testified there was a strong odor in the house. They found breathing difficult and their eyes burned and watered. Fifty-six of the pigs never got up and were dead the next morning. Nine more were found dead several days later. The skin on the surviving pigs was badly burned, their eyes were “cloudy white” and they could not see. “They staggered and wobbled and couldn’t find the feed or water.” The sows would not breed and were worthless for breeding purposes.

*1176 Plaintiff promptly notified Meredith who said 'the man from whom they had gotten the spray would come out with him and see the hogs. Shortly thereafter plaintiff again talked with Meredith and was again told they would come out and plaintiff should do nothing with the hogs until they saw them and advised him. They never inspected the hogs. Meredith said he had been unable to contact the hog spray man. Later plaintiff asked Meredith what he should do with the pigs and was told to burn or bury the dead pigs, take the live ones to a sales barn and dispose of them. Plaintiff testified the pigs were worth $5 per head and the sows $30 or $40 per head after they were sprayed.

Dr. John Shoeman, a veterinarian, testified he examined the surviving pigs, June 23. Their skins were dry, thickened, cracked over their backs and shoulders and around their ears, some were blind, some with white corneas and swollen lids. They were gaunt and in poor condition. He made a post-mortem examination of two with the most skin lesions and found their livers were greatly enlarged and showed fatty degeneration which he diagnosed as due to chemical poisoning. The skin was three times normal thickness. He found enteritis in the pigs, but did not believe this caused their deaths. It was his opinion the impaired condition of the skin flared the enteritis. In his opinion some chemical put on the skin, which impaired its function, was the primary cause of death. He examined the spray and testified that type of fluid is generally used to paint chicken roosts to kill mites and for the preservation of wood, like creosote. It is a volatile material which becomes a gas when it reaches a certain temperature, apparently at the body temperature of a hog. In his opinion the pigs which died shortly after they were sprayed died of suffocation from material which volatilized at their body temperature when it came in contact with their bodies. The pigs breathing that gas had spasms of the glottis. Irritating material in the glottis causes it to close, there can be no intake of air .and the animal suffocates. He testified also the spray would cause chemical burns of the kind found on the hogs he examined.

When the evidence for both sides was completed defendants moved for directed verdict (dismissal). Rule 216, Rules of Civil Procedure. The motion was overruled, the jury returned a verdict for plaintiff and judgment was rendered thereon. There *1177 was no motion for new trial but defendants moved for judgment notwithstanding verdict, based upon the refusal to direct. Rule 243, Rules of Civil Procedure. This motion was overruled and defendants have appealed. They agree the appeal is limited to questions raised in their motion for directed verdict and repeated in their motion for judgment notwithstanding verdict. Friedman v. Colonial Oil Co., 236 Iowa 140, 145, 18 N.W.2d 196.

In considering appellants’ contentions, the evidence, under the familiar rule, will be viewed in the light most favorable to plaintiff. The jury having returned a verdict for plaintiff, the function of this court, at this point, is not to weigh the evidence but to determine whether the verdict is supported by substantial evidence. On that account reference has been made herein to only part of the evidence for plaintiff and little of the evidence for defendants.

I. Appellants’ main contention is the evidence the hogs were killed and injured by the spray is insufficient to support the verdict. They rely upon Tracy v. Liberty Oil Co., 208 Iowa 882, 226 N.W. 178, and Hildebrand & Son v. Black Hawk Oil Co., 205 Iowa 946, 219 N.W. 40. In Tracy it was claimed the death of sick hogs resulted, a few days later, from feeding them defendant’s mineral preparation. However, there was no evidence to support this. Experts on both sides were unable to give an opinion as to the cause of death and spoke of several diseases as a probable cause. In Hildebrand there.was no evidence connecting the use of the preparation with the death of or injury to the hogs, some days later.

The foregoing cases were referred to in Miller v. Economy Hog & Cattle Powder Co., 228 Iowa 626, 293 N.W. 4, which involved the death of sheep some days after they had been fed defendant’s stock powder. There, evidence by veterinarians that ingredients of the stock powder would probably cause sickness and death of the sheep and that the deaths were not from disease was held sufficient to require submission to the jury* of the question of proximate cause. Plaintiff cites other decisions of this court, none as strong as the case at bar, upon the question of causation. Here, there was evidence the hogs were in good health. Plaintiff applied the spray in accordance with the directions *1178 given him by Meredith. Five minutes later he returned to the hog house and found almost all the pigs lying incapacitated on their sides and kicking and gasping for breath. The sows were restless and were immediately turned out. The pigs were dragged into the open air.

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Bluebook (online)
69 N.W.2d 399, 246 Iowa 1173, 1955 Iowa Sup. LEXIS 419, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/marxen-v-meredith-iowa-1955.