Petition: A Neighbour Called Police for Four Years. It Took Five Starved Goats Behind a Supermarket.

In September 2025, five dead goats turned up behind an Aldi off Mountain Creek Road in Hamilton County, Tennessee. Bone lab analysis found they had starved before they died. Investigators traced them to a property on Suck Creek Road, where they found roughly two dozen more goats, two horses and a donkey still wearing its auction tag. Thirteen of the goats were underweight.

The man living there did not own the property. David Russell Eck, 74, had been staying on it, and a neighbour named Lina Hart had spent four years calling the police, the county and the state about what was happening there before anybody filed a charge.

A grand jury has since indicted Eck on thirteen counts of animal cruelty and two of criminal trespassing. He has been arrested four times since the goats were found. His lawyer, Josh Weiss, says Eck denies the allegations of cruelty and abuse. He has been charged, not convicted.

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What happened between those four arrests is the part worth following. A court evicted him from the Suck Creek Road property. He went back. A judge barred him from owning animals of any kind while the case proceeds. Deputies then found him living on a houseboat with ducks, cats, dogs, chickens, roosters, mice, fish and a turkey. Three malnourished ducks were walking on the bed. Officers noted these animals appeared to be living with him as companions rather than as livestock.

An arrest report describes the ground at the original property as severely eroded and composed mostly of mud, muck, faeces and animal bones.

So the ownership ban this kind of case usually ends with already exists here. It was imposed, and it did not stop anything. That is why the petition asks for something different: mandatory mental health counselling as part of sentencing. It is an unusual ask for this category, where nearly every campaign ends at a lifetime ban, and in this particular case it is the more sensible one, because the ban has already been tested and failed.

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The other thing this case documents is how long the system took. Four years of calls from a neighbour, to three separate levels of government, before five bodies behind a supermarket forced the issue. Animal control complaints are routinely logged and closed without a visit, and livestock neglect in particular falls into a gap between agriculture departments and animal services where neither treats it as theirs. The surviving animals, including a burro called Jinny, are now on a farm in Soddy-Daisy with a man named Adam Presley who took them in after the Tennessee Department of Agriculture seized them. Our coverage of the ordinary end of animal care assumes somebody is watching. For four years on Suck Creek Road, somebody was. It just did not matter yet.

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