Court Opinion

ID: 9632683
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 11:21:47.450402+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:08:21.181342
License: Public Domain

GOLDEN, Justice,
dissenting.
I join in Chief Justice Macy’s dissent; in addition, I write separately, and only briefly, to voice my concerns about several other points raised by the court’s opinion.
The court’s opinion ignores the undisputed facts, most if not all of which come from the insured’s own testimony. The insured conceded that until his “boarding” agreement with Brooks, he had never taken in another’s cattle to feed on his corn stalks. The insured’s farming business was raising an irrigated crop, not feeding another’s cattle. The insured conceded that under his agreement with Brooks, he (the insured) was to take care of the cattle as if they were his own. The court strains to characterize the “boarding” agreement as a pasturing agreement, ignoring the express terms of the agreement which place the cattle in the insured’s possession and require him to provide them with owner-obtained feed if the snow covers the corn stalks, to provide them with owner-obtained salt and mineral, to take a daily count of them, to locate any cattle not accounted for, to maintain an electric fence and manage the cattle within that fence, and to watch the cattle for signs of sickness and notify the owner of any sick cattle. Implicitly, and as a matter of common sense, the agreement required the insured daily to take the cattle to and from his corral and corn field. The insured concedes that he placed bean straw in his corral before the cattle arrived so that they would be on a dry surface. He provided the cattle water in the corral. He discussed with Brooks the amount of time the cattle should be allowed to graze on the corn stalks, stating, in his view, he should limit them to two hours a day at the outset, rather than let them graze for an unlimited time. Having obtained Brooks’ consent on this point, the insured monitored the grazing time accordingly. The insured’s activities under the agreement were required; they were not, by any stretch of the court’s imagination, merely the insured’s voluntary “accommodation.”
I am baffled by the court’s taking judicial notice of what would surprise a farmer like the insured or a rancher like Brooks. In my view those matters are not the kinds of things of which courts may take judicial notice. I am amused by the court's lame attempt to “distinguish” the livestock and agriculture cases dealing with the “care, custody or control” exclusion on which the insurer relies; tellingly, the court has no livestock and agriculture cases dealing with that exclusion on which to rely.
Finally, I fail to understand why the court has remanded the case for the trier of fact to decide whether the insured was exercising that degree of “care, custody or control” over the cattle as would exclude coverage under the insurance policy. In violation of our appellate rule, the court has already rewritten the contract (insurance policy) by holding that, as a matter of law, the exclusion applies only if the -in*953sured exercised total (not shared) care, custody or control. Further, the court has characterized as irrelevant “accommodation” all of those expressly and implicitly required activities performed by the insured beyond the “pasturing” of the cattle. Since the court has clearly indicated the result it desires and has stacked the cards accordingly, why prolong the inevitable?
In summary, I find no genuine issues of material fact and would hold that, by application of the unambiguous exclusion to the undisputed facts, the insurer is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.