Posted 5/26/2005 05:31:00 PM by Douglas

As the headline says, "good fences make good neighbors." Unless the fence costs the neighbor $45,000. This story is pretty amazing, yet not that unimaginable. Synopsis from The Agitator.

Cliff's Notes version: Lawyer leaves the hustle and bustle of firm life to do some farming, and buys a tract of land in rural Caroline County, Virginia. He decides he'll build a herd of world-class Angus cattle, and takes advantage of a ninteenth-century law that says if you build a fence, you can charge the adjoining land owner half the costs of putting it up. He buys the most expesnive kind of fence he can find, then sends the bills to his new neighbors, most of them elderly and retired. The most expensive bill goes to a guy named Perry Brooks, for $45,000.

Lawsuits ensue, and ultimately the Virginia Supreme Court unfathomably find the fence law constitutional.

Mr. Brooks has some cattle of his own, and one of his bulls -- ironically enough -- gets through the expensive fence, and taints the high-fallutin' lawyer's world-class herd.

Somebody ends up dead. And it's not the bull.

Flannery O'Connor could have written this story. Except it isn't fiction.

You don't even have to be neighborly, but is it too much to ask to just not be a total dick?