Vegan Sues Neighbors for Barbecuing, Playing Basketball in Their Own Yard
I’ll say this much for Cilla Carden: If she were trying to live up to the stereotype of vegans being censorious killjoys, she ought to win some sort of award.
Carden, a massage therapist from the suburb of Girrawheen, near Perth in Australia, has an ongoing dispute with her neighbors. Namely, she’s sick of them doing things in their own backyard that people usually do in their backyards: playing basketball, smoking and grilling meat.
But not just any meat: Fish, specifically. A pescatarian Cilla Carden definitely isn’t.
“They’ve put it there so I smell fish, all I can smell is fish,” she told Australia’s 9 News.
“I can’t enjoy my backyard, I can’t go out there.”
Man, she’s going to be in for a rude awakening if someone who likes steaks buys a house on her street. I guess this is what you end up getting when you buy a property around — well, I don’t know, people. You could always buy a lot out an isolated lake like Thoreau on Walden Pond, but then I get the feeling Carden might be disturbed by the smell of the fish in the lake. They jump out occasionally, I’ve been told.
Anyway, most times these sort of weird neighborly disputes end up on the news, it’s because one of the disputants simply called the news. Not in this case. Oh no.
Carden decided to take this a bit further — to the State Administrative Tribunal and the Supreme Court.
“It’s deliberate, that’s what I told the courts, it’s deliberate,” she said.
“It’s been devastating, it’s been turmoil, it’s been unrest, I haven’t been able to sleep.”
The courts, bless their dear hearts, don’t agree with our vegan friend, ruling against her at every step since the legal process began in August of 2017.
“The Tribunal does not accept that the parents, by allowing their children to play in the backyard… use the patio for small scooters or toys, constitutes reasonably a nuisance,” the State Administrative Tribunal of Western Australia said, according to the U.K. Evening Standard.
“What they are doing is living in their backyard and their home as a family.”
She then appealed to the Supreme Court, who also ruled against her.
According to the U.K. Guardian, chief justice Peter Quinlan dismissed the appeal in August, saying that he did not believe “that there is an arguable case that the tribunal denied Ms Carden procedural fairness or acted to her disadvantage so as to cause a miscarriage of justice.”
“Ms Carden was given a fair opportunity to present her case, and the learned tribunal member conducted the proceedings fairly and appropriately,” the Supreme Court ruled.
And thus, event though Carden’s neighbor showed 9 News that they’ve taken down their barbecue and dismantled their basketball court all because of the vegan massage therapist from Hades, she’s going to appeal again.
“I’m a good person. I just want peace and quiet,” she said.
If that’s your definition of peace and quiet — demanding that your neighbors cease all normal family activity because it disturbs you and taking them to court when they don’t — then no, Cilla Carden. You are not a good person. You have presented yourself to the world as a living, breathing, walking stereotype who embodies every bad quality people associate with vegans. Not only does this not seem accidental, but from the small sample size I can draw upon, you seem to do so proudly.
Furthermore, thanks to the publicity you’ve generated from this preposterous gambit, the only way you’ll ever end up with a modicum of “peace and quiet” is if you drop this lawsuit posthaste and deal with other families living their life as they see fit to, as people do in every other suburban neighborhood on God’s green earth.
Yes, that means them playing basketball. Yes, it means their kids will use scooters. Yes, Heaven forbid, some of them might smoke. And yes, they’re going to grill fish.
If she needs a way to quell her delicate vegan spirit during those, dark nights of the tofu soul, maybe she can rationalize it all with a quote from the immortal Ron Swanson about our aquatic friends: “Fish — for sport only, not for meat. Fish meat is practically a vegetable.”
If she thinks of it that way, heck, maybe she’ll end up at a neighborhood barbecue one of these days. If not, she can always reference the fact there’s not a single sane person in this world who believes she’s in the right. Maybe that’ll convince her just how ridiculous this all is. Probably not, but it’s worth a shot.
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