What is the effect of a contract for the sale of horses when the contract was signed on December 12, 1924?

Saskatchewan, Canada


The following excerpt is from Rear v. McCullough, 1928 CanLII 288 (SK CA):

Now what took place on the day the contract was signed was that the horses were specifically appropriated to the contract, that the defendant assumed the risk in them, and that he acquired the right to take them away. There is no doubt that, notwithstanding the arrangement whereby the plaintiff agreed to bring the horses to him in the spring of 1925, the defendant, as a matter of right, might have taken the horses away immediately or have come and carried them off at any future time, without waiting until the spring. If the transfer of possession did not take place on December 12, 1924, and was provided not to take place until the following spring, the plaintiff might have resisted an attempt by the defendant to remove them earlier. This, I think, was never the intention of the parties at any time, and it is certainly not possible to draw an inference of any such intention from the contents of the written contract. I think that the facts of this case are similar to those in Elmore v. Stone, 1 Taunt. 458, 127 E.R. 912, which was also a contract for the sale of horses, and where it was held that, although the horses remained with the seller in livery after the contract was made, there had been a constructive change of possession and they were in effect in the possession of the defendant. In this case, the defendant says that he left the horses on the plaintiff's farm and with the plaintiff's horses because he did not need them at that time, and because he was afraid that, if he took them away, they might stray back to rejoin the horses that they had been with. In the acceptation which must be given here to the word "possession," as between seller and buyer, the horses were just as much in the defendant's possession and not in the plaintiff's possession, upon the plaintiff's farm, as they would have been if they had been placed upon the farm of a third person for the winter.

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