A Vegan Woman Sued Her Neighbors For BBQing Meat In Back Yard, Went All The Way To Australia’s Supreme Court

An Australian vegan woman sued her neighbors for, among other things, barbecuing meat in their back yard, which she says was a deliberate attack on her vegan sensibilities, Yahoo News reports. She has taken her case all the way to Australia’s Supreme Court.

Australians may stereotypically tell each other to “throw another shrimp on the barbie,” but Girrawheen massage therapist Cilla Carden would rather her neighbors didn’t.

To be fair, Carden’s beef with her neighbors extends far beyond just their barbecuing. She’s also accused her neighbors of disrupting her peace and quiet in a variety of other ways: by allowing their children to behave in an unruly manner in their yard, by smoking in their yard, and, in what she says is a deliberate act of meanness, barbecuing fish just to taunt her.

“They’ve put it there so I smell fish, all I can smell is fish. I can’t enjoy my backyard, I can’t go out there,” she said via Australia’s 9News.

She took her case to a State Administrative Tribunal (SAT) and in February, as The West Australian reports, was handed her first defeat by a court. She appealed, and on March 29, her appeal was denied. She then appealed to the Western Australia State Supreme Court in July, this time providing hundreds of pages of documents as evidence, causing an exasperated Chief Justice Peter Quinlan to declare her evidence “well in excess of anything that might be thought to be proportionate to the issues.”

The smell of meat sizzling on a barbecue was so offensive to vegan Cilla Carden that she took the matter to the Supreme Court.https://t.co/GasLW80wZn

— PerthNow (@perthnow) September 3, 2019

Quinlan disregarded her evidence and dismissed her appeal. Carden has now vowed to take her case all the way to Australia’s Supreme Court.

“I’m a good person. I just want peace and quiet,” she said.

In a lower court ruling, a judge found that the neighbors’ activities are largely typical of what families do, and that Carden doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on, legally speaking, as The Evening Standard reports.

“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. What they are doing is living in their backyard and their home as a family,” the court said.

This isn’t the first time a vegan has been upset about neighbors eating meat. As reported at the time by The Inquisitr, back in June an English butcher faced calls from vegan townsfolk to stop roasting hogs at his streetside display because they found it offensive. The butcher declined, and vowed to keep up his once-weekly streetside hog roast.