Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/277
The action was brought for interdict to prevent this lamb leaving the highroad and trespassing on the deer-forest. The defender’s justification of his motives was this:—
“If you will allow me, I will state the damage the pet lamb has done. If this is allowed, a great number may be allowed to follow on the same principle. There are nineteen cottars, and there is no reason why, if one has a pet lamb, they should not all have pet lambs, why each should not have one or even ten.”
But he admitted that the cottars themselves would prevent the deer coming to that part of the forest, which, it was said, was suited for the deer in winter. No question of right entered into the matter. The pursuer averred that the defender neither had nor asserted any legal right of grazing. The defender in reply admitted that he neither had nor had asserted any such right. We are confined to the lamb and nothing but the lamb.
The unanimous judgment of the Court may be best given in the forcible words of Lord Young:—
“I am of opinion that there was no trespass by the pet lamb of which a man could complain in a court of justice. I think a trespass—that is, an invasion of a man's right—may be committed by means of a pet lamb, for it may be put where it can do harm. But if you have 200,000 acres of rough land, with a public road running through it, and a cot at the side of the road,—the land being unfenced,—to fence that land against children or against a pet lamb by an Interdict of a court of justice would, I think, be an outrageous proceeding. It is impossible to keep children confined to the highroad, it is impossible to confine pet lambs to the highroad, as it is in like manner impossible to confine a cat or a dog. Life in that part of the country would not be possible if these unenclosed lands were fenced by interdicts of this Court against trespasses of this description. Interdicts are granted by this and other courts of law where appreciable wrong to a man, whether in his property or in his other rights, is threatened. Here there was no appreciable wrong. This lamb, saved and brought up in the manner your lordship has described, when a few weeks old followed the cottar and his wife and children, and even the dogs, along the road, scampered on to the grass occasionally, and, I daresay, took a blade of grass, but did no appreciable wrong whatever; and I decline by any interdict to protect unenclosed lands gainst trespass of that kind. To talk about the lamb growing into flocks of sheep and herds of cattle is really to talk in a way which makes no impression on my mind whatever. If a man wants to protect his lands from being invaded in this way—against children toddling on to the grass at the road-side, or a lamb going on to it, or a cat or a kitten—I say, if he wants to exclude that, he must do so by other means—by fencing the lands, for example, and not by applying to her Majesty’s judges for interdict.”
Such a story makes the blood boil. It can only be likened to the story of that other pet lamb told by the prophet to David. “The poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.” Truly, in the present case, too, when we hear how the rich man sought to take away the poor man’s pleasure, we are inclined to echo the cry of the warm-hearted king, “As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die.”