How Many Visiting Pigeons is Too Many?

Owners Corporation RP000992 v Stock (Owners Corporations) [2020] VCAT 495

GoStrata’s CaseWatch is a short, sharp and easy-to-understand review of important and interesting Court and Tribunal decisions affecting Australian strata title stakeholders.

---

Quick Read

This 2020 VCAT decision is about whether a strata owner keeping and feeding a lot of pigeons at a South Yarra, Victoria strata building was a breach of the model rules and should stop because of the impacts on the rest of the building and other strata owners.  The primary issues involved the details of the impacts, which model rules applied and how they applied. VCAT decided that there were breached of model rules 1.1 and 4.1(1) and ordered the strata owner to stop providing food, water or refuge to pigeons because it was causing health hazards and obstructing the use of common property pathways covered in droppings.  The decision seems obvious but is counterintuitive since it is not based on model rules about pets and instead on more general model rules. Plus, it also means breaches depends on the degree and severity of the impacts.  So, determining how many visiting pigeons area okay or too many is more difficult.

---

Implications

The key implications of this strata case are as follows.

• Feeding visiting pigeons in strata buildings can breach model rules under the Owners Corporation Act 2006.

• Which model rules apply depends on the details of the impacts of the visiting pigeons on the strata building and strata owners.

• In this case, Model rule 4.1(5) about keeping pets did not apply.