Except as in this chapter otherwise provided, any person owning or having charge or possession of any buffalo, horses, mules, cattle, goats, sheep, or swine that trespass upon the land, either fenced or unfenced, owned by or in possession of any person, or being cropped by any person injured by such trespass, is liable to any such person injured for all damages sustained by reason of the trespass. No person is liable under this chapter if the person injured has maintained an inadequate partition fence and notice thereof has been given pursuant to § 43-23-5 or if the person is not required to build the fence because of frozen earth pursuant to § 43-23-7.
S.D. Codified Laws § 40-28-4
Liability for trespass by livestock--Exception where fence inadequate
Applied in 7 court decisions — leading case Zoss v. Schaefers (1999)
Most recently applied in Ladson v. BPM CORP. (June 2004)
Source: CCivP 1877, § 747; SL 1883, ch 115, § 1; SL 1885 (Spec
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.