If you don’t get along with your neighbor, you’d better make sure that you’re not violating any city ordinances.

What would you do if you had a property with a one-acre front yard and a one-acre backyard and you kept two cows in the backyard even though the city ordinance says each large animal needs its own acre?

That is the situation for the guy in this story, and the neighbor kept threatening to report him for violating the rules, so he opened the gate between the front and the back and let one of the cows graze in the front yard. This way, the neighbor had nothing he could complain about.

I think this was a smart way to handle the situation. Read through the full story and see if you agree.

One large animal per acre

When I was 5yo we moved to a house that was in a normal neighborhood with lots of houses and mostly pretty normal sized yards, but on the larger side.

Buying a house that comes with a horse is unusual.

This particular house had an acre pasture behind it and there was a horse that the previous owners sold with the house.

We had that horse for a couple of years, which my dad loved. He taught my brothers and me how to ride. Then one Labor Day the horse died.

This is not the way they planned to spend their Labor Day.

Well the dead wagon won’t come pick up a dead horse on a holiday, and you can’t just leave it in your pasture when you live in a neighborhood with lots of houses and people around.

My uncle owned a service station and a wrecker truck, so he and my dad somehow loaded the horse onto the wrecker truck and covered it with the pool cover and drove it to wherever you take dead horses a couple hours away.

They got a lot of strange looks from people wondering what was under the pool cover.

Cows can be great animals.

So, now we had a pasture with no horse and my dad had always wanted cows, so he bought two cows to keep as pets.

Our next door neighbor was an older couple and for some reason the guy didn’t really like us. You’re technically only allowed one large animal per acre, so two cows was breaking the rules.

So, they have the property required to house two cows.

The cows weren’t bothering literally anyone, so no one cared except the neighbor that didn’t like us. He would constantly threaten to turn us in.

The thing is, our front yard was also an acre. It had a fence, but it was mostly decorative, just two posts with the top one maybe four feet high and no gate across the driveway.

I doubt that the guidelines even say each animal needs its own acre.

But after one too many threats from the neighbor, my dad told him it’s all good, we’ll just move one of the cows to the front yard.

He brought one to the front and let it graze a little bit and that was enough for neighbor guy to back down and never complain about Mindy and Wendy again.

It is great when neighbors can reconcile.

I don’t know what happened later (my dad probably does) but at some point the guy turned a corner and then loved us.

He talked to us all the time and would take pictures of us playing for the sole purpose of giving them to my parents because they were nice neighbors.

At least everyone is getting along now.

I’m sure that didn’t happen until we got rid of the cows and got another horse.

The cows did get out once and made their way to the corner in front of a hospital on the busiest street in town. We got them back and they were fine but it was too much trouble just to have pet cows.

Sometimes you have to get creative to stop a neighbor from threatening you. That is exactly what the dad did in this story.

Read on to see what the people in the comments think about what happened.

The house this commenter is talking about sounds like fun. And messy.

This is just not something you see in the city.

Very funny.

Now this would be a shocking sight.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a student who did the math and figured out he was better off skipping school than serving detention if he forgot his ID.

This was a great story.

He may not have liked the cows, but now he gets to see even more of them. It is a good thing that the neighbors worked out their differences, though.

If the guy had a problem with this family, he should have just talked about it rather than threatening to go to the city.