i can ride both sides of this fence.
a few years ago my crazy next door neighbor decided to try raising chickens. keep in mind that this is a residential neighborhood. also the old man is deaf and once he takes his hearing aids out at night he sleeps like a baby no matter what kind of ruckus ensues.
at first it was o.k. he had about three hens walking around in the yard pecking about. then his little yap dogs took to barking at the chickens all day. that was trying but tolerable. next came a rooster. it crowed every morning and woke us up but even that was o.k.
then it got much worse. he soon had about a dozen hens walking about and 4 roosters. he put the roosters in pens that he placed right next to the fence, as physically close to our bedroom window as he could. if anything disturbed even one of them at night then they would all start crowing. once the roosters started his three little terriers would nut up. as soon as the terriers got really going it would set his two coon dogs off and the circle never stopped.
on a 3/4 acre residential lot he had at least a dozen hens, four roosters, three terriers, two coon hounds and three goats. it became absolute mayhem. in the middle of one particular night i had to call and wake his wife who coped with the issue by wearing ear plugs to bed. we had missed a couple of hours sleep per night for over a week and that night the animal farm had been in full voice for over three hours. turns out he had bought a new coon dog and had brought a raccoon home to use to train the new coon dog and it just got the entire mess stirred up beyond control.
i told his wife that we had to have some relief from the noise. of course they went out on the back porch and started yelling at the animals to shut up which only made it worse. the next day i told the old man something was going to have to give. could he at least move the rooster cages to the other side of the yard? he said the other neighbor complained when he did that and it also put them too close to his bedroom which upset his wife. so his idea had been to park them under my bedroom window instead.
when we moved in he had two coon dogs. that was tolerable. when he added a terrier and the goats it was still o.k. by the time it was six dogs, three goats, four roosters, a dozen hens and a raccoon the lack of sleep had become intolerable. had we been in farm country this number of animals would be expected. in a 1/3 acre fenced area of back yard in a residential area it was uncalled for. in fact it was cruel to the animals.
a few days later the roosters were gone and life was a little better. he moved the new coon dog to his sons house along with the raccoon and we were happy enough with the situation to keep our complaints to ourselves. then the incident happened.
a couple of his hens got in our back yard somehow. at the time we had a dog that was very territorial. outside of its pen she never harmed another animal. when it was upstairs it never bothered the cats, out in the world it never chased a thing. if something got in her yard that was it though. possums, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits or whatever. when it crossed the fence line it died. i thought this was an honorable trait in a dog.
on this particular day blondie turned the hens into a cloud of floating feathers. my wife watched the incident in horror but it was already in progress and the dog had two of colonel sanders finest for lunch. she went next door and told the neighbor what had happened.
when i got home he was upset about our dog eating his chickens. our yards are separated by a fence that is owned by me, on my property and only designed to keep my dog contained. he was claiming it was my fault because my fence wasn't tall enough to keep his chickens out of my yard. i informed him that it was not my responsibility to contain his chickens. he needed to see that they stayed on his property. he said he was not able to afford to have a fence company build him a fence and he was not physically able to build it himself. he said i needed to build a bigger fence.
that is when i got upset. i had spent a decade trying to deal with this senile old guy but this incident sent me over the edge. i informed him of the local ordinance that prohibited farm animals in a residential neighborhood. i could tolerate his yipping dogs, the goats didn't bother me at all, but if he couldn't contain his chickens i would not accept responsibility for my dog killing them. i actually was so upset at this point that i told him that if i saw his chickens in my yard i was going to encourage my dog to have a snack.
of course from this point on my relationship with this neighbor is in the toilet. some of the other neighbors have applauded someone actually standing up to the nut. he has threatened to assault at least two folks over the years and some of them are scared of him.
the sad thing is that it was chickens that finally drove the final nail. especially now that i have a chicken. he gives me some really ugly looks when i have chicken little at the house and take him for a walk in the yard. of course my chicken lives inside and he can only wake me up when he bunks over at the house, not any neighbors. but owner responsibility is key to how the rest of the world interacts with your pets. recently he moved away and the neighborhood is all the better for it.
since chicken little stays at work most of the time the farm animal rule is a non issue. especially when ya'll hear what my business is zoned for. i have owned this shop four 23 years but it was built as a commercial chicken hatchery. that is what it was originally zoned for. i can have as many chickens as will physically fit in the building. ain't that handy.
michael
