How to fight a squatting goat

0:00Support comes from our 2025 lead sponsor of Planet Money, Amazon Ads. Less than half of customers fully trust their financial institutions. Amazon Ads helps financial brands build that trust through relevant ads using first-party signals to reach the right customers. More at advertising.amazon.com. This is Planet Money from NPR. If it were not for a small herd of goats, Burt Banks never would have landed in the middle of a totally mind-bending legal conflict. The story starts a couple years ago, when Burt decided it was time to finally deal with some family land he inherited. It's about three miles from the ocean.

0:47It was very rural, a great place to grow up. The land was around the corner from his childhood home in Delaware. We lived next to my grandparents, and they had a chicken farm and some property in that area. His grandparents' bucolic land, or a piece of it, that is the land at the center of this story. Bert lives in Atlanta now, works as a financial advisor, but he still makes visits back home. In the 16 years since he inherited the land, he and his husband go by occasionally, even toy with the idea of building a summer house there. In the end, though, they decide it just made more sense to sell it.

1:26So Bert got together with his brother Ralph, packaged five little lots together, and they found a buyer pretty quickly, a local real estate developer. Bert doesn't remember the exact figure, but he says the price was somewhere in the$300 ,000 to$400 ,000 range. Everything was going great. The prospective buyer was going through all the steps, has the land surveyed. And then Bert got a call from his realtor. She contacted us and said, uh-oh, you've got a problem. You've got an encroachment. And the purchaser does not want to move forward until the encroachment is removed. And what is an encroachment?

2:03Like, what was it? She had a goat fence. A goat fence. The goats in question here belong to one of Burt's neighbors. The surveyor had found that about half of their pen crossed over onto one of Burt's undeveloped lots. Burt's brother, Ralph, went to talk to the goat's owner. He explained what the land surveyor had found and asked, could she please move her fence back onto her own property? But nothing happened. So after about a week, Bert followed up with a certified letter. Still nothing. At this point, it was down to the wire. Bert was worried this was going to wreck his plans to sell. So he got a lawyer.

2:42Bert says he had the lawyer reach out to offer the neighbor$1 ,500 to move her goat pen. Once again, nothing. And the proposed land deal ended up falling apart. You were on the cusp of selling this property for$400 ,000. And so the developer was like, I want no part of this because of the goat fence. Yeah, he kind of sensed that there was a feud going on. So he just withdrew his offer. And while there was not a full-on feud going on yet, Bert was pretty frustrated. it. All he wanted to do was sell this land that he very clearly owned, but because his neighbor wouldn't move her fence, he couldn't.

3:26Bert says his lawyer tells him, if you want this person off your land, you are going to have to sue. And that is how Bert wound up taking his neighbor to court to get a judge to tell her to move her goat fence. That choice Bert made to sue his neighbor, it does not go at all the way Bert expects. It sets off this chain reaction. And ultimately, Bert finds himself fighting over something much bigger than whether his neighbor should move or goat fence off his land. Instead, he ends up fighting for the right to own his land at all. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Keith Romer. And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi.

4:05When you own something, a car or some shares of Apple stock or a plot of land, it is easy to assume that you can kind of do whatever you want with that thing. You own it. And if you don't want it anymore, you can just sell it to someone who does. And it is an equally reasonable assumption that by and large, the courts are going to have your back on this. Guaranteeing property rights is one of the fundamental things that the American legal system does. But sometimes the law can get pretty squirrely about whether somebody really does own a thing. Today on the show, the wild, goat-filled, kind of absurd story of Burt Banks' fight to own the land that he already owned.

4:50It's law and order, barnyard unit.

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5:44So last week, I drove down to Delaware to get the other side of the story. The land that Bert inherited from his dad is in this very quiet, kind of rural feeling area. The road is unpaved. There are all these trees, lots of space between the houses. One of those houses belongs to the neighbor with the goats. My name is Melissa Schrock and I do web development and marketing and also have a myriad of farm animals. That's how I identify myself. Aspiring farmer. Around back of Melissa's place, there's a shed, broken down gazebo, an old lawnmower, and the goats at the center of this fight. This is Gabby.

6:25That's a collie. It's cinnamon. What's the smallest goat's name? That's Evelyn. You're in a lawsuit. Any comment? The goats live in this big fenced-in pen, roughly the size of a basketball court. They've got a little house, an old kids' play structure they can climb on. Melissa says the whole business with the goat fence was more complicated than Burt made it sound. Her family has been on this land for years, ever since she was a teenager. That's when her parents bought the lot, put in a double-wide, and moved in. After they decided to retire, Melissa bought the home and the lot from them. So to her, what she and Burt were fighting over was not just a piece of property that you would try to get a good price for.

7:08It was her home, where she lived. You can see, if you see all those brambles and all that brush, all that kind of green stuff, those are those really thorny, like, vines that will, like, poke you. And so that is what this area used to look like. If parts of the land are clear now, she says, it's because she and her family and the goats in question were the ones to clear it. Between her house and the next one over, there are some woods. When she was in high school, Melissa and her friends would go out there to hang out. it turns out those woods were squarely on Burt's land. But Melissa insists she always thought that was just part of her family's extended backyard.

7:49I always, like my family had always thought that we kind of shared, like half of these woods was ours and then half kind of belonged to that house. Which was why she was so surprised when Burt's brother Ralph showed up at her front door one day in October of 2021. The guy came up to the house and was like, hey, so I just want you to know that we're trying to sell these lots and your fence is over the line. Melissa had met Ralph before, but says she had never even heard of Bert, let alone that he owned what she thought was her backyard. But still, she figured they could sort out where she needed to move her fence to.

8:24At that point, I was like, I thought maybe he meant like by a couple of feet, but I was like, OK, I'll take care of it. Tell him to call me. You know, handle it neighbor to neighbor. She says before she moved the fence, she just wanted to know where the survey they had done said she had to move her fence to. So a couple of weeks went by. I didn't hear from him. I ended up calling my own survey company and I was like, I need to have a survey done. And they're like, well, you know, we're scheduling out a month. We can come in like December. So I was like, well, I guess December it is. So at that point, I forgot about it.

8:51I figured he'd end up calling me. But I never heard from anyone again until probably about a month later. Melissa says she never got the certified letter that Burt sent her. and that offer of$1 ,500 that Burt says his lawyer made, when I asked Melissa about it, she said it was news to her. According to Melissa, the next person she heard from was someone delivering a lawsuit. Like the guy with the gun in the sheriff's office, emblem on his car, comes up to your house and knocks on the door. Like, are you Melissa Schrock? And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, here. And like gives you the papers real quick before you can like slam the door and turn them away.

9:25And then he can sign the paper saying, I physically gave this lawsuit to the person that's named in the lawsuit. At first, Melissa didn't even entirely understand what was happening. I was like, what is this? You know, like, you're not FedEx. But then I looked at it and realized, oh, he is suing me. Wow, gee, go figure. Tucked in with the paperwork was the survey Melissa had been waiting to get from Bert. It showed that about half of her goat pen was on his property. It did not take long for her feelings to change from confusion to something else. I really started thinking, you know, man, like, this is messed up.

9:59Like, I got mad. I was like, why didn't this guy call me? I told his brother to have him call me. Melissa is the kind of person that you do not want to back into a corner. She decided if Bert didn't want to handle this neighbor to neighbor, if he wanted to fight this out in court, property owner to property owner, well, then she would figure out how to fight him in court. The court document specifically says you need to come to court and give us a reason why you shouldn't have to vacate the premises. So I was like, well, there has to be a reason. There has to be some legal argument for not moving her goats.

10:35So she starts Googling around, educating herself about the basics of property law. And, you know, on the surface, owning property is this very cut and dried sort of thing. I have the deed to a chunk of land. This piece of paper that says this land belongs to Keith. End of story. But as Melissa keeps reading, she starts discovering all this nuance hidden beneath that simplified version of things. Like, she learns about the small but significant difference between the ideas of ownership and possession. Right. If I own a cowboy hat and I lend it to you for the weekend, Alexi, I still own the hat, even if you possess it for the two days that you are out riding the range.

11:17That distinction between ownership and possession can matter a lot when it comes to disagreements over land. In some cases, just possessing the land for long enough, living there or farming there, can give you the right to take it over. Even if you don't legally own it, a judge can make you the owner, can take the title from the first owner and just give it to you. The fancy term for when someone takes over someone else's land like this is adverse possession. As in, possession that is adverse to the original owner's ownership. You may have heard of squatter's rights. Squatter's rights are like a subgenre of adverse possession.

11:55But it's the same idea. When I first started reading up on this, there was a part of me that was like, this cannot be right. Like, I could go buy land somewhere, get the title to it, and then like five or ten years later, someone else could just come along and take it from me? Yeah, what happened to life, liberty, and property? In all these other cases, the state is so clearly on the side of property owners. If somebody steals your car, then the government, you know, the police and the courts, they are going to punish that person. Or for things like trademarks, if someone rips off a company's brand, the government's probably going to have something to say about that.

12:32But land turns out to work a little differently. And there are a couple of reasons for this. For one thing, there's only so much land to go around. So historically, governments have used laws around adverse possession to shift ownership of land from absentee landowners doing nothing with it to people who are actually living there or farming there. The state's like, if you're just going to let your land sit there, maybe we're going to give it to somebody who will actually use it. The other reason land works differently comes down to just like record keeping. How hard it is for governments to keep track of who owns what.

13:06In the U.S., there's no central land registry where there's like a giant map of the country with all the borders between people's property clearly marked out. Instead, people just hold deeds that say, in 1956, I bought this chunk of land from Keith. But a fair amount of the time, those pieces of paper disagree with each other about where exactly somebody's land begins and ends or who even owns a piece of land in the first place. Courts need a way to decide between those claims. And one easy way to do that is just to figure out who's actually been using the property. So Melissa is taking all this in, drinking from the fire hose of property law scholarship.

13:48And the more she reads up on adverse possession, the more convinced she gets that this is the argument she should use in court. So at that point, it was just looking up, OK, adverse possession, Delaware. What do you need to, you know, what's the criteria for that? How do I go about doing that? Maybe there was some way that her possessing Burt's land with her goats could trump the fact that, according to all the paperwork, Burt very much owned that land. Melissa finds out that to make that argument, she's going to have to sue Burt back to countersue, which she says she feels a little weird about.

14:22But she goes ahead and files the paperwork. Back in Atlanta, Burt and his husband get a call from their lawyer. We were totally blindsided. We had never considered the possibility that somebody hostily would try to take your land away. Bird is really upset. He's already had the land sale fall through. And he's like, there's no question this land belongs to me. My family has owned this land for generations. And now someone moves in next door and is like, actually, I'm going to go ahead and take that. It makes no sense to him. I think this is just so counter to what our country stands for. that your property interest could be taken away by a neighbor that wants to squat on a portion of your land.

15:08But, but, it is not like these laws just throw out property rights altogether. Because the bar you have to clear before you get to take somebody's land away from them, that bar is set very, very high. After the break, a courtroom throwdown for control. of the Goat Pen.

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17:05If that's you, thank you so much for your support. If it's not, it could be. Sign up at plus.npr.org. Bert and Melissa's preparation for their big trial over the goat pen took very, very different forms. While Burt spent time gathering evidence and answering questions from his lawyer, Melissa had decided she was going to represent herself. So she was basically teaching herself the laws that governed adverse possession from scratch. Like I read every single like the judge's opinion and all the information I could find about every single adverse possession case that's been heard going back to like 18 something in the state of Delaware.

17:44She figured if she could identify what had worked in previous cases, maybe she could just copy the arguments those lawyers had made. The laws around this stuff are different state to state, but they usually require adverse possessors to meet the same five basic criteria. And you have to meet all five, no questions asked. If you miss in one, then you don't win the case. The criteria can be a little redundant, kind of overlap in places. So we're going to boil down a little everything Melissa was learning. For Melissa to win, she would have to prove that she and her family had essentially been acting like they were the exclusive owners of Burt's land for 20 years.

18:23And that Burt hadn't done anything in that time to either kick them off or to give them permission to keep using the land. For Burt to win, all he had to do was convince the judge that that wasn't how things had gone down. That in one way or another, Melissa had not met all five of those criteria. Last December, the day of the trial finally arrived. More than a year after all this got started, Melissa and Bert laid eyes on each other for the very first time in Delaware Superior Court. The mood was very official, a touched adversarial. So we sat on the left-hand side, and I was there with my husband David and our attorney.

19:02It was pretty much just them and their lawyer and me in the courtroom. Each side made their opening statement. You know, this is the timeline, this is everything I've ever done, and this is how I meet the criteria of adverse possession. With the judge sitting up front in his robes and the stenographer typing away, Burke and Melissa each made their case as to why they were the ones who deserve the land beneath Melissa's goat pen. She opted to start calling her own witnesses first. So she called a friend of hers and she called up her brother. I got on the stands and then, of course, they got on the stands and their witnesses and my witnesses.

19:37But because I didn't have a lawyer, I got to be the one questioning everyone. Melissa went first. She and her brother and her friend talked about how they used to hang out in the woods. How before the goats, her family had kept dogs and chickens in the backyard. How Melissa's dad had used some of Bert's lot as a kind of storage area for his tools and lawnmower and wheelbarrow. And to prove that her family had been possessing the land for the full 20 years the law required, Melissa produced a series of photos taken the first year she and her family had moved in. She pulled them out to show me when I was down visiting her.

20:09This is Thanksgiving 2001. This is my mom sitting at the table with the calendar in the back that says 2001. So that's, I forget what the technical word is, but it's proving that it happened in 2001. Hartley, Melissa liked these photos because that calendar, it's proof. They've been there for 20 years. But she liked the pictures even more because of what you could just barely see in the background behind her family. And so that's my dad. And you can see out this window, you can see the shed back there. Through a window behind Melissa's dad, you can just make out the shape of a building. Maybe a pile of lumber?

20:47It's kind of hard to tell. We actually argued back and forth in court, me and the other guy's lawyer, about what that item is. And can you tell me what that item is? And do you remember what that is? And what do you think that is? Melissa's trying to show through all the photos, okay, there's the property line. The shed is on my family's side. But all the other stuff in the pictures, the lumber and the pool liner and her dad's table saw, that stuff would have been across the line on Bert's land. And the whole time she's making these arguments, she's also privately kind of freaking out about having to keep up her lawyer impression.

21:20I kept trying to remind myself, like, lawyers do this every day. Like, if you were a lawyer, this would be Tuesday to you. Like, this would be no big deal. Like, just because you have no clue what you're doing, you know, doesn't mean you should feel some kind of way. It's fine. She says when Burt's attorney tried to introduce a photo that he had failed to disclose in the discovery process, she even got to fulfill the fantasy of every would-be lawyer. Because I literally, I was like, objection! That, you know, was not in discovery. And I thought that was so weird, but cool. After Melissa had her say, it was Burt's turn.

21:52What was it like for you testifying? What do you remember about being on the stand yourself?

22:03Nervous, but very, very focused on telling my story, telling what I perceived to be the truth, correcting what I thought were untruths that were stated. To counter Melissa's claim, Bert just has to show that she fails to meet one of the five legal criteria for adverse possession. Bert and his lawyer put a lot of their focus on the idea of exclusivity. They argue that even if her family had used Bert's lot some, it wasn't like they had completely taken it over. Bert testified that his father had been using the land right up to his death in 2004. My dad, once he retired, he had a portable sawmill on the lot.

22:49And so he would get my uncle to pull up logs, and then he would use a sawmill to trim them up and make planks. As evidence, Bert introduced his own photograph, a picture of him and his husband David with Bert's dad at the sawmill. Bert says that photo was taken towards the beginning of that 20-year period that he and Melissa were arguing over. And so what we tried to show with Dad having the sawmill on that lot behind her house, that it was not exclusive, that he also used the lot as well. So that's why it was kind of key. After hours and hours of this, you might think the judge had heard enough.

23:27But then, and this is maybe my favorite part of the story, he's like, actually, what I'd like us all to do is tomorrow, let's all meet up at Melissa's house and we can all walk around on Bert's lot together. So we all met out there, I want to say like at 9 o 'clock in the morning. It was all very, very cordial. We all just walked around at a big party. I'm like, here's my goat pen. Here's my fort. Here's my trail. Like, here it is. You want to check yourself for ticks when you're done. I mean, is he wearing his robes at this point or he's back to business casual? I would say he was in fairly sturdy clothing.

24:05His clerk that went with him had a beautiful cashmere-long coat on, which was totally covered with briars, so I don't think he was a fan of the site visit. There wasn't much conversation. No one was allowed to make any arguments or try to sneak in any last pieces of evidence. Melissa and Bert and Bert's husband and their lawyer and the clerk just kind of tailed along behind the judge as he made his way between the trees and the brambles. And then, that was it. You all walk the land together, and then everybody gets in their cars, like, chunk, chunk, chunk, the door. They all leave. That's how it happens.