‘Chicken Lady’ Cries Fowl as Neighbors Win Round in Feud

Her nests are empty. Gone is the scratching of little feet. Her chickens have flown the coop.

After a three-year feud with her neighbors, the “Chicken Lady” of Redondo Beach has surrendered--for now--and complied with a court order to rid her yard of pet roosters and hens.

The Torrance Municipal Court hearing Friday verifying the removal of as many as 35 chickens from the back yard of 37-year-old Roseanne Smith was to have settled, once and for all, one of the more bitter standoffs in the booming South Bay between the old way of life and the new.

But Smith’s neighbors, Tom and Josie White--who are building their “dream house” next door--say it will take more than a court order to end the dispute that has festered between the two households since the Whites bought the neighboring lot in 1986.

Smith agrees.

“What goes around comes around,” she said Friday, glancing darkly at Josie White. “Maybe someday something bad will happen to them, and then they’ll think twice about what they’ve done to me.”

Across the courtroom, Josie White, 35, vowed to ask the City Council to ban chickens from Smith’s back yard. She promised to sue if she ever again hears so much as a cluck from her neighbor’s yard.

“She has violated health codes, building codes, city codes--you name it. She’s just a person who cannot follow rules,” Josie White said. “I know I sound a little hostile, but I’m the one who’s had to live next door.”

“The Chicken Situation,” as the Whites have come to call it, has gone on since they bought the property next door to the South Irena Avenue cottage where Smith has lived all her life. Anxious to snap up the lush corner lot for their planned five-bedroom Mediterranean estate, the Whites didn’t realize until after they had moved in that the yard next door was full of roosters and hens.

When neighborly appeals to remove the birds didn’t work, the Whites went to City Hall and then to court, where Smith was convicted of violating an animal permit. Placed on probation until February, 1990, Smith agreed to reduce her flock to six birds. But within months, her yard was full of chickens again--sickly strays, she said, that had been left at her door.

Last month, after the Whites reported the apparent probation violation, Municipal Court Commissioner Douglas Carnahan ruled that the birds had to go by Friday. Hoping he would change his mind, Smith kept a dozen anyway.

In a letter pleading for leniency, she told Carnahan that the birds “are as important to me as my own children--in fact, I have no children but these.”

“My place in life and my happiness in this world depend to a very great extent on my little pets,” she wrote. “They hold the key to my heart and always will. Life has no value to me without them.”

When the deadline came, she said, her chickens were with a friend who had agreed to keep them until after Friday’s hearing. But Carnahan stood firm.

Now, Smith said, she doesn’t know what she will do. She has no immediate plans to give away her birds. In two months, she noted, her probation ends, and perhaps then she will ask the city to renew her six-chicken permit.

In any case, the woman who has become known locally as the “Chicken Lady” said she won’t rest until her feathered friends come home to roost.