much, which is not only a damage to the stock, but causes a heavy shrinkage, and you know the packers will not pay full price for bruised stock. One shipment we made we unloaded by order of the railroad company, who set our stock out and demanded that they be unloaded. The yards were not strong or safe. Our cattle broke out and it took us fully two hours to gather them up, causing a very heavy shrinkage, and the cattle did not arrive on the market in good shape, whereby, if they had been allowed to remain in the cars we would have been on the market one day sooner and made a profit; but as it was we lost money. The shippers are too wise to want to hold cattle on the cars if they in any way suffer, and we should be granted the thirty-six hours by all means from a humane standpoint and a business proposition. Yours, truly,

ED. MALEY.

STATEMENT OF MR. MURDO MACKENZIE, MANAGER OF THE MATADOR LAND AND CATTLE COMPANY, TRINIDAD, COLO.

Mr. MACKENZIE was sworn by the Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. What is you business?

Mr. MACKENZIE. I am manager of the Matador Land and Cattle Company.

The CHAIRMAN. Is that company engaged in the raising and production of cattle?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. To what extent?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Seventy thousand head of cattle.

The CHAIRMAN. What official position do you occupy in connection with any of the stock interests?

Mr. MACKENZIE. I am president of the American National Live Stock Association. This association comprises practically all of the stock interests west of the Mississippi River.

I would like to make a few remarks in answer to Mr. Whitehead before I start on my own statement. Mr. Whitehead criticised Mr. Levering for talking about the improved condition of the stock cars. If Mr. Whitehead had been a practical shipper he would know very well that the improvement in the stock car has been very material in the last twenty years. The springs are better, the brakes are better than the old-time hand brakes. We had the old-fashioned coupling, and when the cars came together when the train stopped the impact was so great that the cars came together with such force that it knocked many of the cattle down. To-day we have air brakes, we have better springs, and we are in better shape all around to ship our cattle than we were fifteen or twenty years ago. The cattle can ride easier, and it is like comparing the old coach of twenty years ago with the Pullman of to-day.

Mr. BURKE. What about the roadbeds?

Mr. MACKENZIE. They have been very much improved in the West. They are better ballasted, the steel is heavier, and consequently a train will ride over the road very much easier.

The CHAIRMAN. And then you have the continuous rail which was unknown twenty years ago?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Yes, sir; I am glad that Mr. Whitehead has disclosed the names of the cattlemen with whom he spoke as to the advisability of shipping cattle within twenty-eight hours. We tried to get from Mr. Whitehead at the two meetings the names of those

people who gave him the information, but he refused absolutely on the ground that he did not want to divulge the names. Why anybody should be afraid to state his honest opinion about this matter is more than I can understand. I will say that Mr. Porter, of Denver, is a personal friend of mine, and I met him at the train one day and I spoke to him about this matter. He is a member of the humane society; he is a cattleman. He told me emphatically that he did not have any objection to the extension of time. Now, Mr. Whitehead speaks of him here as one of the parties who objects to the extension. Mr. Whitehead spoke about the car that was shipped from Pueblo. The car shipped from Pueblo might or might not have had an excess of the 22,000 pounds minimum. It might have been overloaded, but it is not worth while talking about it, because it is not a fair example of any shipment which may have been made. Where there is no restriction on the 22,000 pounds cattlemen can ship as many as they please.

Cattlemen are like men in every other kind of business. They are not all particular as to what they should do when they have an opportunity of overloading stock, and in this particular case of a carload being shipped from Pueblo to Denever they might not have been so particular in getting the cattle put in as comfortably as when they ship a longer distance. Gentlemen, it would be idle to take an example of people who only ship their cattle a short distance to the market and compare them with those of us who have to ship a longer distance. It makes a great difference in the way you load the cattle. It makes a difference in the number of times that you unload the cattle. You take it from the Panhandle of Texas to the market at Kansas City, and if you get 18 miles an hour speed, which Mr. Whitehead claims the railroads should make, you can not get to the market within the twenty-eight hour limit. When you take the cattle off the cars they are entirely different from the cattle that you are familiar with in the East. They are not gentle cattle. They are not familiar with men walking on foot. They do not see a man on foot once in six months. If they do they run away from him just the same as a wolf would do. When you take the cattle off the cars and put them in the pens with a lot of people around them, they do not rest as gentle cattle would. They are nervous, and they get frightened and they keep walking and running around instead of resting and eating and drinking. For that reason I claim that it would be more humane to send the cattle forward to the market and to get them out of their misery just as quickly as possible.

When I say to you that the wild cattle on the range shrink from the very minute that you commence to gather them for shipment, it will make you understand the misery that the cattle go through from the time the men commence to gather them until you get them on the block. If you were to talk from the humanitarian standpoint, leaving the interests out of the question entirely, I say to you emphatically, as a man who has had experience in this business for twenty years, having gone with the trains myself time and again, that it is more humane to get the cattle to the end of the journey just as quickly as you can and get them out of their misery and end their lives. It is most unfortunate that we have to kill cattle. It is most unfortunate, as a gentleman said this morning, that we had to ship cattle,

but conditions compel us to do so. One would infer from the statement made this morning that cattle should not be shipped a distance of 500 miles at all. Suppose you gentlemen should restrict us to that limitation, what would be the result? The result would be that we would have to let the cattle die on the prairie. That is the condition exactly in which we are in. We are faced with a condition which compels us to ship the cattle. We are faced with a condition that we should get to the market with the lowest possible misery to the cattle in transit-get them to the end of the journey as soon as we can, and get them out of their misery. I can cite cases to prove every word I say here.

The distance from Estelline or Channing, Tex., to Kansas City is 650 and 550 miles, and we can not possibly get to the end of the journey in twenty-eight hours. If the law is enforced it would compel us to unload the cattle at some point in transit, and that point might not be a hundred miles from Kansas City. If the law is enforced we would be compelled to take the cattle out at that point. Sometimes they are put in pens that are crowded. It is easy for people down here to say, "Why don't the railroads make provision to receive your cattle," but if the railroads were to make provision to receive the cattle it would create such an expense to the railroads that what we would have to pay them would be more than would justify us in raising the cattle.

I have one case which I will give you in point. I shipped a train load of cattle to Kansas City, and at Harrington, which is 14 miles from the market, the humane society insisted that we should come off onto the side track and that the cattle should be put in the pens, but when they got to the pens the pens were full, and my cattle had to stand in the cars from 8 o'clock at night until 10 o'clock the next morning before there was room in the pens to receive them. It would have been more humane to have sent the cattle on to the market, which they could have reached in five or six hours. Then we had to go through the same process of reloading them and forwarding them to market. I shipped cattle to Dakota over the Rock Island, and when I came to Hutchinson, Kans., where the trains had to be unloaded, where the train should have been unloaded, there was no room in the pens to receive my cattle, because the pens were already filled with cattle. When my trains came on they had to stand there, because there was a washout in front of us and we could not go on, and the cattle that we took out of the cars got into mud up to their bellies, and I lost 33 head of cattle out of the train load which I unloaded at Hutchinson, and out of those that I did not unload I did not lose one.

The CHAIRMAN. You did not unload one train at the end of twentyeight hours?

Mr. MACKENZIE. I did not; I had no room.

The CHAIRMAN. They remained in the cars?
Mr. MACKENZIE. Yes, sir; all the time.

The CHAIRMAN. How long a time?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Eleven hours standing in the cars, because they could not go forward.

The CHAIRMAN. How long did they remain in the cars from the time they were loaded?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Twenty-four hours getting to Hutchinson and eleven hours there, and then they had to be sent on to Harrington to be unloaded and fed.

Mr. BURKE. How long there?

Mr. MACKENZIE. About six hours.

Mr. BURKE. That would make forty-one hours?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Yes, sir. I had another case on the road to Denver. I got as far as Trinidad, when a washout occurred. Some cattle were there which had come in ahead of me and had to be unloaded. I went to see the pens. I saw what condition they were in. I found that the cattle were wading in mud up to their bellies. The railroad people informed me that I had to unload my cattle; they could not send them on. I said "I am not going to unload them." There was a washout, and they could not send them forward. I said, "I can not unload them. I am not going to put my cattle into those pens." I held the cattle on the cars for ten hours. They were twenty-four hours on the cars before this. I sent them on to Pueblo before I unloaded them and fed them, a distance of 90 miles farther. Mr. RYAN. How many hours were they delayed there? Mr. MACKENZIE. About eight hours.

Mr. RYAN. That makes forty-two hours?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Yes, sir. I did not lose one hoof of cattle out of the four trainloads. The man who had to unload his cattle in the pens at Trinidad, one man alone lost forty-three head in the shipment of one train. I saw cattle dying without being able to lie down. They were in mud up to their bellies. Which was the most humane? That matter was left entirely to me because I had the greatest interest in the stock. It would be foolish for anybody to suppose that I did not have the greatest interest in seeing that they were in the best possible condition. If I had not had the greatest interest I would have unloaded them into the pens and the result to me would have been a great loss.

I had a trainload come to Chicago in August of last year. Just previous to my shipment a neighbor of mine, Mr. Bloom, shipped a few cattle from Montana. The cattle looked well and the packers were anxious to pay $4.50 a hundred for them. I felt pretty good over it because there was a trainload of my cattle near the market. Mr. Bloom's cattle had to be unloaded a hundred miles out of Chicago. That was the third time that they had been unloaded. The packers bought them and took them down to the slaughterhouses and found when they slaughtered them that they were bruised and not desirable for their custom. My cattle came in early the next week, Monday. The packers came down and said, "Gentlemen, these cattle had to be unloaded a hundred miles out of Chicago just like Mr. Bloom's cattle, and we will have to cut you fifty cents a hundred on the price." That is the result.

The CHAIRMAN. When was this?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Last year.

The CHAIRMAN. While the law was being enforced?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Yes, sir; and that was the reason why we insisted upon Secretary Wilson coming all the way from Washington to Chicago to investigate this question on the ground. After Mr. Wilson had come to Chicago and had been to the yards and stayed there for three or four days-I would not be positive how long he

stayed there-but he saw the cattle coming in which did not have to be unloaded out of Chicago, and he saw the cattle coming into the market which had been unloaded out of Chicago, with the result that Mr. Wilson came to the decision and so ordered that the twentycight-hour law should not be enforced where the railroads tried honestly to bring the cattle in to their final destination. He said he would not be a party to the prosecution, and so the prosecution failed. It was not enforced, as far as I know.

Now, gentlemen, in taking cattle to Chicago, a bunch of steers that will weigh 1,100 pounds in the field will shrink, depending on the condition of the cars, from 50 to 75 pounds during the first twenty or twenty-four hours.

Mr. STEVENS. That is on the cars?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Yes, sir; on the cars, or when you unload them. If you reach your market by that time they have shrunk from 50 to 75 pounds, dependent on the cars and the age of the cattle, the older the cattle up to five years the less the shrinkage. If you keep the cattle on the cars a greater length of time than that the shrinkage is considerable, but it is not of the same kind. You commence to shrink the beef in the cattle. The first twenty to twenty-eight hours you shrink the grease in the cattle. Afterwards you shrink the beef and if you take them off the cars and insist on keeping them off from twelve to twenty hours longer than we could be able to get to the market you are not only causing the animals misery, but you are shrinking the stock, and you can not shrink the beef of the animal without misery to the animal. The cattle are feverish and wild, and can not be used as you use the gentler cattle from the corn-fed country. My experience has been this, that in handling wild cattle, taking them off the car and loading them for five or six hours, they do not rest at all.

Mr. STEVENS. Why?

Mr. MACKENZIE. They are nervous and afraid of the people around the pens. They are not accustomed to the people.

The CHAIRMAN. That is range cattle?

Mr. MACKENZIE. Yes, sir. In speaking about cattle I speak about western cattle. You know that the men around the stockyards try to feed the cattle, but instead of the cattle looking for feed and water they are looking around watching the people walking, and if they see something they will rush off and sometimes will knock down some of the other cattle. That is my own experience, gentlemen, and it is not an experience of hearsay. It is an experience from being around the cattle when they are being shipped and being with them on the cars until they come off at the end of the journey, and in my experience I have found that it is inhuman to take the cattle off the cars if you can get them to the end of the journey in a certain time. I have not agreed upon any time and can not suggest what would be the proper time, but I feel that by giving us thirty-six hours, which would be one less unloading, it would materially add to the comfort of the cattle.

Is there any question which you wish to ask?

Mr. BURKE. The stock men are generally asking for an extension of the time from twenty-eight to thirty-six hours. Are they also asking for a speed limit?