Is the buff orpington (that’s a breed) chicken that 2‑year-old Sarah Rastelli is petting indeed a pet? Or is she petting livestock? The zoning board will consider that very question, which has ramification for chicken-keepers all over town.
If the board finds that the chickens are pets, there’s no problem. If they are deemed to be livestock, however, then it’s quite likely Sarah and her mom Rebecca are in violation at their Westville home of zoning ordinances which seem not to allow livestock within the city limits.
The Weiners — and the many other New Haven families who, anecdotal evidence suggests, keep chickens for pets and/or for eggs — are in no mood to let the status quo rule the roost, as it were. They plan to make their case at a zoning board hearing on Oct. 9.
The issue came before the board because of a noise complaint. “We’ve had chickens here, a small flock of five or six,” explained Sarah’s mom Rebecca Weiner (pictured above), “since about 2002. And all that time nobody ever complained. The chickens laid eggs, and we distributed them to the neighbors. The kids (such as Dante Petti, pictured above also) come to visit,. It’s a real nice feature for the neighborhood, and they learn where eggs come from, and the whole cycle of life and all that, which is important. Otherwise city kids will think Twinkies grow on trees.”
The Rastelli/Weiner family lives on Willard Street near Forest Road. “A week ago or so, a woman in the building behind us, 200 Fountain, an anonymous caller, phoned into the city that ‘a rooster’ was making noise at 7 in the morning and waking her up,” Rebecca Weiner said. “First of all, we’ve never had roosters in an urban setting. They crow and it’s a problem. Whoever the complainant was, she probably heard a little cackle, which is what the chickens do when they lay an egg. It’s not loud, believe me, and from my perspective, as a new mom, if I could sleep to 7 or 7:30 every morning, that’d be great!”
Whether the caller confused her roosters with her chickens or not, Livable City Initiative (LCI) made a visit, according to Weiner, who is a business consultant with expertise on China, where she lived for 12 years. (“Lots of people there have chickens and are much closer to the food cycle for sure.”) LCI issued a cease and desist order. Weiner and her husband Michael Rastelli appealed it, and so the matter now goes before the zoning hearing in October.
Weiner said that in preparation for the hearing she has gathered about 30 signatures from neighbors attesting that the chickens, which live in a large fenced area with a capacious coop or house inside it, are not only no problem, but a pleasure. These neighbors include young people such as Dante Petti, who exults in the challenge of chicken catching for reporter/photographers. His sister Bianca specializes in feeding the chickens. Their mom Gwendolyn says she knows of many families in Fair Haven who raise chickens for the eggs. Supporters also include people who have been living on the cozy block for four decades and more, and remember when.
For example, across the street neighbor Kathy Ouellete (pictured), who has spent her life on Willard Street, said she signed Weiner’s petition, and gladly. “I really don’t know what the big deal is. Years ago, over there on Forrest, there was a guy with rabbits, chickens, ducks, and all of us kids went over there in the early 1960s; it was never a problem. And it’s great here. All the kids go over, and Rebecca’s great about giving the eggs to all of us.”
But it apparently was a problem for at least that one resident of an apartment in the 200 Fountain St. building. The five story apartment building — the only high-density structure in the immediate neighborhood — has small, apparently closed-shut windows facing the Weiner backyard, but balconies on both sides.
The building is about 20 feet from the fence on the other side of the Weiner coop.
Weiner is preparing to offer, at the October hearing, to move the entire fenced-in chicken area and the coop all the way across her yard, perhaps another 50 feet so that it will be now adjacent to her garage, offering a new and substantial cackle-free zone. “I really want to be a good neighbor about this,” she said.
Weiner’s gentle and even-handed demeanor, however, goes hand-in-hand with a commitment to keep her chickens and all they represent. She grew up on a horse farm near Rochester. (“My dad was a Brooklyn boy who mucked out stables at Aqueduct Raceway and thought the height of elegance was owning horses; so when he made a good living in the technology business and I was 12, they bought a horse farm.”) Although there were no chickens, an aunt nearby did have chickens on her farm, and that was how Rebecca Weiner became a farm girl.
She believes strongly in the slow food movement. When she purchased her first flock (having researched slow food on the fast Internet) six years ago, at least a half dozen other families joined in. They found what she described as New England heirloom breeds marketed by the McMurry Hatchery, and they divided the smallest purchase they could make — 50 chickens — among them. “There was one rooster in our group,” Weiner recalled. “When it got old enough to crow, because it would really have disturbed the neighbors, we went out one morning, and a neighbor took the feet, and I took the head, along with a cleaver from the kitchen, and we slaughtered it. Although I’d plucked chickens before, I had never slaughtered one, and that was an important experience for me.” She’s part of an informal movement to legalize the keeping of such farm animals within the city.
The alarming degree to which people are cut off from the natural world, she said, is symbolized by the complainant thinking the cackle of the chicken was the crow of a rooster. “We’re a long way from our roots. A very common urban misconception, for example, is that where there are chickens laying eggs, there must be a rooster. Not so. A rooster is needed only to have a fertilized egg, that is, to make more chickens. But chickens, when they reach the right age, about eight months, just start laying eggs, unfertilized eggs, but perfectly fine to eat. They keep laying with astonishing output until they’re about four years old, at which time, here, they become our pets.”
The Weiners have six chickens in all, two golden laced wyandottes, and one each buff orpington, Rhode Island red, a speckled Sussex, and a black sex-link – all different breeds. They live, by all appearances, a chicken’s life of Riley, with spacious coop, and feed that is reinforced by oyster shells that Weiner and the visiting kids, like Bianca Petti, gleefully add and distribute, yelling “here, ladies, here’s your food.” The oyster shells add calcium, Weiner explained. “They make all those egg shells full of calcium, and lose so much themselves.”
Weiner did not crow, or cackle, about the coop and facilities of her free ranging animals but did point out that commercially raised chickens live in “batteries” of cages some 20 feet high, never see the light, are pumped full of antibiotics, which contribute to our own problematically growing, she said, antibiotic resistance. “Battery chickens get their beaks and claws clipped or they kill each other they’re so close, their feces drop on each other, and that’s how you get your 39 cents a pound supermarket meat!”
These small flocks, by contrast, she said (well, she did crow a little), produce delicious fresh eggs and meat, are natural pest controllers, produce fertilizer, are wonderful educators for children about the natural world. And for adults, too, Weiner added, because they are interesting and even relaxing to observe.
Weiner converted her conviction to a formal request for her alderwoman Ina Silverman(25‑D) to propose legislation legalizing the keeping of chickens in the city. Reached by email, Silverman said: “As to the complaint that was made to LCI, I believe it hinges on whether the chickens are livestock or pets. For afterwards, Rebecca asked me to submit possible legislation that would allow a limited number of chickens to be raised legally in town with reasonable restrictions. No one to my knowledge has complained before and other neighbors seem to think of her chickens as small dogs with feathers that lay eggs that Rebecca generously shares with them. I, myself, have never been bothered by a chicken.”
LCI’s Frank D’Amore said, “Yes, I think you’ve got a zoning problem there. I’m not 100 percent sure, but according to Section 29 of the zoning ordinances, ‘livestock are prohibited in the city limits.’ Are chicken considered livestock? That’s the question. I’m pretty sure they are. It’s a grey area, because in some Spanish culture, keeping chickens is pretty traditional. We have some trouble enforcing this.”
As to the complaint about the noise, a half hour spent at 200 Fountain Avenue did not yield a witness, either pro or con the chickens. Two calls to the supervising manager of Tarragon Management, Inc., which owns 200 Fountain, to determine if she had received complaints before or heard of the present one, went unreturned. However, the on-site property manager, who asked not to be quoted and said that she was at such a place in the pecking order she could not talk to the press, admitted, with a smile, that she was a farm girl herself.