Informed Opinions on Today’s Topics : Pets That Crow Make Listeners Feel Peckish

The sun comes up and a rooster crowing “cock-a-doodle-doo” greets the new day.

Ahhh. Morning in Chatsworth.

“That rooster really drove people crazy,” said Lee Shapiro, a Pierce College teacher who used to live in Chatsworth and was awakened daily by the rooster’s reveille.

He and his neighbors were experiencing a problem well known to those who live urban but wake up rural, creating a legal problem unexpected in a megalopolis.

“We don’t really keep records on this,” said Linda Gordon, an administrative service officer with the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation, “but I would say we get hundreds of complaints in a year.”

If the rooster’s owner refuses to do anything about the sunrise wake-up calls, tired residents turn to the law for help, but the law as it applies to city fowl is not cut and dried.

“I remember one woman complaining that her neighbor’s roosters were making so much noise, it was really getting to her,” said Maureen Varvir, a volunteer who takes calls at the county animal shelter in Agoura.

“We sent someone out there, but the owner said she had a right to keep chickens because she was in an unincorporated area.”

And the owner was right. “There is nothing in our regulations saying you can’t have the animals,” Varvir said. The city of Los Angeles also has no specific laws against crowing roosters, though barnyard fowl are required to be housed at least 100 feet from the neighbors.

But take heart, all those who unwillingly get up with the sun. Specific laws may not exist, “but that doesn’t mean neighbors are not entitled to peace and quiet,” said Varvir.

A general county ordinance notes: “All animals shall be so maintained as to eliminate excessive and nighttime noise.”

When a shelter receives a valid complaint, Varvir said, the animal’s owner is given 15 days to remedy the problem or protest the action.

Varvir said a rooster owner who doesn’t want to face legal action will usually have to get rid of the fowl. “You can de-bark a dog, in fact judges have ordered it in some cases,” Varvir said. “But there is not much you can do about a chicken.” But there are other solutions, according to Shapiro, who teaches animal and veterinary science. Indeed, the offending rooster in Chatsworth was his own.

“We did a nutrition experiment at school involving chicks, and afterward, some of us took the chicks home. They were so small, we could not tell if they were roosters,” he said.

“Mine was.”

Shapiro said roosters and human males both crow, in their way, for the same reason--testosterone.

“Inject a hen with testosterone and she’ll crow, too,” Shapiro said.

So one solution to the noise problem is rooster castration, although the surgery is expensive. “Their testicles are internal,” Shapiro said, “which makes it a more involved operation.”

Thankfully--from a rooster’s viewpoint--there’s a simpler answer.

“I put my rooster in a cage and put on a cover at nighttime,” he said, “and that took care of it. He didn’t make noise until I took the cover off in the morning, or until something woke him up.

“One time, someone tried to break into the garage and that woke him up, so he crowed. Scared the robber away.”

Shapiro had not only solved his noise problem, he had made an unexpected discovery.

“He was a good guard bird,” he said. “We never had a problem with robbers again.”