Protecting your property from trespassers

By Art Macomber, Managing Attorney

October 9, 2017. People who own larger acreages should be concerned about trespassers and squatters. In Idaho, even if your property is fenced, care should be taken to give notice to hunters, fisherman, and hikers when they are crossing onto your property.

Landowners have to post No Trespassing signs every 660 feet or less around property borders in order to use Idaho statutes to enforce their rights to exclude trespassers.

Many landowners believe they can paint the tops of their fence posts with orange paint and that will be sufficient to give notice.

Unfortunately, the only notice that is given by painting your fence posts orange is that the top of the fence post is painted orange. Aside from perhaps wishing everyone a Happy Halloween, landowners should know orange paint is legally insufficient to give notice to potential trespassers that to move past the orange paint is a violation of the Idaho code against trespassing.

In Idaho, you have to post signs!

Here is a link to the statute. Don’t forget to pay attention to the semicolons:  https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/Title6/…/