Cattle Lived In Montana Home For Month And Damage Really Piled Up

Some cattle recently wandered into a newly built home in Montana and took up residence for a month before they were found. The calling card they left behind wasn't unexpected. The house looked more like a barn than a home, with manure piled on the floor and splashed on the walls.

The homeowner posted about the stinky discovery on the social media site Reddit, where it received some 10,700 “upvotes.” The post read: “This big guy and three of his friends got into our newly built Montana house and proceeded to live there for a month before being found.”

But don’t blame the bovines. It’s unclear exactly where the, ahem, “poopapocalypse” occurred, but Montana’s open range law may mean the cattle rancher isn’t liable for the damage.

In most cases, it’s the responsibility of the homeowner to fence the cows out in Montana, where cattle outnumber people by about 3-to-1. The law is a vestige of the Old West, and similar laws are in effect in Wyoming and Colorado, which also have vast stretches of undeveloped land. At one point, 23 Western states had open-range fence-out laws.

The law generally shifts responsibility for roaming cattle from the rancher to the neighbor. The premise behind it speaks to the importance of the cattle industry in Montana — it was less expensive for a homesteader to fence cattle out than for a rancher to fence them in, especially in Montana’s early days when cattle grazed on large tracts of land owned by the state and federal government.

The fence-out law remains “important in very rural parts of our state with big expanses of land,” Brian Ohs of the Montana Stockgrowers Association told Patch.

“Say you’ve bought 40 acres somewhere in Montana, and I own 1,000 acres around you.” he said. “It’s up you to fence your property if you don’t want cattle on your property.”

But Ohs understands the homeowner’s distress.

“It’s a very unfortunate situation,” he said. “I can understand why they were miffed to find several cattle dwelling in their house.”

The photos have since been removed from social media sites, but you can follow the Reddit discussion here and see the damage the cows caused to the home on ABC/Fox Montana’s website.

It’s unclear exactly where the incident happened, but the thread on Reddit says the owner of the cattle had reported his missing livestock stolen and had been diligently searching for them. He had even looked in a shed on the property, but not in the house because he thought it was occupied.

And, Oohs joked, who would think to look for cattle in a house?

The Reddit poster figures the cattle were seeking shelter after a bad storm in late April and may have gotten in “by nudging a lever door." Another possible scenario: "The wind might have blown the door open.”

The poster said the damage was discovered by “my poor stepdad.”

“He came back practically in tears and just kept saying, ‘it’s ruined, it’s all ruined. There’s cows everywhere,’ ” the poster wrote. “It’s a crummy situation, but hopefully we’ll all be able to laugh about it later on.”

The owner of the home suggested the answer may be to never again chew on a steak or grill a hamburger, noting:

“I’m going to become a vegetarian to please the cow gods so that this will never happen again.”