The holding, and why it is about procedure

The Court's reasoning is short and it is mostly about the division of labour in a covenant case.

Construing the covenant — deciding that the general prohibition on poultry is limited by the household-pets exception, rather than operating as a flat ban — was a question of law the trial court answered correctly, consistent with Armstrong v. Ledges Homeowners Ass'n, 360 N.C. 547 (2006). That part was never really in dispute.

What happened next is the holding. Having construed the covenant, the court properly submitted the remaining disputed facts to jurors. The verdict “reflected the ‘commonsense judgment of the community’ as to the issues presented,” consistent with “the fundamental right to trial by jury in civil cases which is guaranteed by our Constitution.” Because it was supported by “more than a scintilla of evidence,” JNOV was correctly denied.

The Court also held it was not error to refuse the owners' requested instructions on how courts construe ambiguities in restrictive covenants — the strict-construction canon, and the rule favouring free use of land. Those are rules for a judge interpreting a covenant. The jury was not interpreting anything; it was applying a term the judge had already construed. Giving it interpretive canons “would have likely confused the jury.”

The dissent. Justice Riggs, joined by Justice Dietz, would have vacated and remanded for a new trial, arguing the majority gives insufficient weight to the rule that covenants are strictly construed in favour of the free use of land, and that courts should not hand jurors what are properly questions of law.

What this means for an association

Read carefully, this decision cuts in a direction that is easy to get backwards.

It is not a holding that chickens are not household pets. The Court did not decide what a household pet is, and nothing in the opinion establishes a rule about poultry. A different flock, kept differently, in front of a different jury, is a different verdict — and that is precisely the Court's point.

What it establishes is that in North Carolina, where a covenant turns on an evaluative term that the judge has construed, the application of that term is a jury question that will not be taken away on a sufficiency motion where there is more than a scintilla of evidence either way. For associations and owners alike, that means:

• These cases get expensive. A dispute that both sides expected to resolve on summary judgment or JNOV instead goes to a jury, and survives post-trial motions. Neither side can reliably buy certainty on paper.
• The evidentiary record is what decides it. The association here developed testimony on how the animals were actually kept and used. Scale mattered — sixty birds is not obviously the same proposition as three. Enforcement files that document conditions over time are worth more than files that document correspondence.
• Strict construction still applies, but earlier. Owners get the benefit of the free-use canon when the judge construes the covenant. They do not get it again from the jury box.

The drafting lesson

The Oak Grove Farm covenant is not badly drafted. It bans poultry expressly. It still produced a jury trial reaching the Supreme Court, because the exception it carved — “dogs, cats, or other household pets” — was broad enough that the judge read it to qualify the ban.

Associations reviewing pet and animal restrictions should notice that the litigation risk sat in the exception rather than in the prohibition. A declaration that enumerates permitted animals, or caps numbers, removes the evaluative question that made this case triable. One that uses an open-ended category invites it.

This is worth setting against Villazon v. Osborne, decided six weeks later, where a covenant phrased in terms of “annoyance or nuisance” was held void for vagueness outright. The two decisions mark the boundary: an evaluative term inside an otherwise concrete restriction goes to a jury; a restriction that consists only of evaluative terms may not be enforceable at all.

What to watch next

This is the court of last resort and the mandate reverses the Court of Appeals, so there is no further review in this case.

What is worth watching is how the Court of Appeals applies it. Smith v. Forge Creek, decided in May 2026, sends an architectural-review reasonableness question to trial on materially similar logic — the covenant question resolved as a matter of law, the evaluative question preserved for the factfinder. If that pairing holds, North Carolina is consolidating a general rule that covenant disputes turning on reasonableness or characterisation are tried, not decided on motion.