How you fight a squatting goat

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Back in 2005, Burt Banks inherited a plot of old family land in Delaware. But when it came time to sell it, he ran into a problem: his neighbor had a goat pen, and about half of it crossed over onto his property.

Burt asked the goats' owner to move the pen, but when neighborly persuasion failed to get the job done, he changed his strategy. He sued her. And that is when things got complicated.

Protecting private property is one of the fundamental jobs of the American legal system. If you hold a deed saying you own a plot of land, it's your land. End of story. Right?

But, as Burt would soon learn, the law can get really complicated when it comes to determining who actually owns something. And when goats are involved ... anything can happen.

This episode was produced by Willa Rubin and Dylan Sloan and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Katherine Silva engineered this episode. Jess Jiang is Planet Money's acting executive producer.

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Music: "Fruit Salad," "Keep With It" and "Purple Sun."

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.2	If it were not for a small herd of goats, Burke Banks never would have landed in the middle
0:11.9	of a totally mind-bending legal conflict.
0:16.1	The story starts a couple years ago, when Burke decided it was time to finally deal with
0:21.6	some family land he inherited.
0:23.4	It's about three miles from the ocean.
0:27.3	It was a very rural, great place to grow up.
0:30.3	The land was around the corner from his childhood home in Delaware.
0:33.8	We live next to my grandparents and they had a chicken farm and some property in that area.
0:41.8	His grandparents Bucolic land or a piece of it, that is the land at the center of this
0:47.5	story.
0:48.8	Burke lives in Atlanta now, works as a financial advisor, but he still makes visits back home.
0:54.2	In the 16 years since he inherited the land, he and his husband go by occasionally, even
0:59.1	toy with the idea of building a summer house there.
1:02.4	In the end though, they decided it just made more sense to sell it.
1:06.4	So Burke got together with his brother Ralph, packaged five little lots together, and they
1:11.4	found a buyer pretty quickly, a local real estate developer.
1:15.1	Burke doesn't remember the exact figure, but he says the price was some in the $300-$400,000
1:20.2	range.
1:21.2	Everything was going great.
1:22.8	The perspective buyer was going through all the steps, has the land surveyed, and then
1:28.1	Burke got a call from his realtor.
	...

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