Feathered Pets Give Wing to Comforting Memories of Home

The cackling chickens and roosters kept in stacked cages behind Elia’s Pet Warehouse have the look of fear in their eyes.

It’s that twitching, bug-eyed, ready-to-jump-any-second look that I remember from the chickens in my own childhood backyard.

You can’t blame them. There they are, in unfamiliar surroundings, crammed together wing to wing in the stifling summer heat with only a corrugated tin roof overhead for shade. Meanwhile, people walk past in a constant parade, examining the assemblage and carrying away the plumpest, healthiest members of the group.

But most of the birds have nothing immediate to fear.

Elia’s Pet Warehouse in the Florence-Firestone area near Huntington Park sells about 400 chickens and roosters each month, and nearly all of them end up as household pets or occasional egg producers. That’s right, pets, not five-piece meals with a side order of cole slaw.

In many heavily Latino communities in South Los Angeles, the Eastside and the San Fernando Valley, these feathered pets are allowed to wander freely--sometimes illegally--around the yard, thriving on corn feed and afternoon naps in the shade. And unlike other household pets, they are not burdened by flea collars or leashes.

Some immigrant families say chickens and roosters represent a living, crowing reminder of simpler days on the farm in Mexico or Central America. To them, raising poultry in the inner city or suburbs is no stranger than keeping a hamster or a parrot.

As a growing number of Los Angeles residents, particularly Latino immigrants, buy poultry pets, officials with the city of Los Angeles’ Animal Services Department say the number of new pet stores that sell chickens, roosters, ducks, geese, goats and other farm animals has jumped in the past few years.

Exactly how many stores in the city sell such animals is unknown because, in addition to the 150 licensed pet shops, many have opened up without city permits in hard-to-find places such as indoor swap meets, said department spokeswoman Jackie David. The agency has only one full-time inspector to search for unlicensed shops.

At the Alameda Swap Meet at 45th and Alameda streets, shoppers can buy chickens, roosters, pigeons and hamsters at two pet stores run out of cramped stalls next to where merchants sell novelty toys, cosmetics, athletic shoes and designer clothes.

Some of the larger stores, such as John’s Pet and Feed on Florence Avenue, occasionally carry goats. But they sell pretty quickly, particularly around the holidays, when families get together for steaming plates of birria--shredded, marinated goat meat.

At Elia’s Pet Warehouse, a converted two-story Florence Avenue house decorated on the outside with a lush jungle mural, store manager Rosa Garamillo said most of the chickens and roosters she sells end up as pets or egg producers.

“It’s a tradition,” she said.

“The majority of people around here and in Huntington Park are real Mexicans,” she said as she pounded her fists on the glass counter top. “Mexicans from the farm!”

Garamillo has even sold chickens to people living in apartments.

“In places like Compton and Bell Gardens, everyone has chickens,” she added.

As she spoke, one of her customers, Rejena Villegas of Downey, who was in the store to buy a pair of rabbits for her daughter Lupita, chimed in. She explained that she was raised on a farm in Michoacan, Mexico, and is the proud owner of a rooster and a chicken, which she keeps in a cage in her backyard.

“It’s like having a dog,” she said with a grin. “I like to feed them and just raise them.”

*

Like Villegas, my father was raised on a farm, where his daily chores included milking the cows, slopping the pigs and collecting the eggs from the hens.

So when my family moved from Jalisco, Mexico, to a quiet suburb in Northern California, he didn’t think twice about setting up a rickety old chicken coop in the backyard. Games of catch with my brothers and sisters often ended abruptly when the ball disappeared under the coop and into a pile of chicken dung.

The chickens occasionally produced eggs, but when my younger brother Alex witnessed an egg exiting a hen, he swore off them for years, saying he couldn’t eat something that came out of there.

After the chickens were killed and eaten--mostly in burritos and stews--my father used the coop to raise rabbits.

At one point, he also bought a brown and white goat, which he kept in a vacant field next to our backyard. The goat, he said, was a pet for my grandfather, but it was my dad who taught that goat to sit up and beg.

Still, even the talented goat met the same fate as all the other animals that came to live with us. So we never got attached to any of them.

When it came time to butcher them, my dad did the killing and my brothers and sisters and I grudgingly helped in the plucking, skinning and cleaning. Then we all happily gathered around the dining room table and shared in the meaty bounty provided by our temporary barnyard guests.

*

Today, pet store owners in Los Angeles say that some live chickens are sold for eating but that most people find it is more convenient to buy a supermarket chicken, already cleaned and cut.

The prices for live poultry can range from $8 for a Golden Sex-Link--a common yellow and white chicken--to $15 for a full-grown Rhode Island Red rooster with dark, glistening plumage and bright red comb.

A handful of roosters end up battling to the death in illegal cockfights. But for the most part, chickens and roosters sold in the inner city live a happy existence as beloved family pets that occasionally bestow an egg or two.

Kay Sallows, the manager of Glenoaks Feed in Sun Valley, whose store sells chickens to customers throughout the San Fernando Valley, including upscale Encino, said there is nothing like fresh eggs.

“The fresh egg is almost orange in color, and the yolk stands up in the pan,” she said.

Maria Luna, a mother and housewife living in South Los Angeles, bought a slew of baby chicks last year, and now her gated frontyard is alive with cackles, crowings and flying feathers.

She said she was raised in a small farming town in Guanajuato, Mexico, and is accustomed to having the fowl around.

Her current neighbors have never complained, she said. In fact, when a chicken gets through her frontyard fence, neighbors corral the escaped bird and return it to her.

Will she ever eat them? “No,” she said. “They are my pets.”

Granted, as pets, live poultry has drawbacks: The animals don’t play fetch, and roosters have a tendency to crow at ungodly hours of the morning. For that reason, it is illegal in the city of Los Angeles to keep a rooster or any other fowl that screeches, squawks or crows within 100 feet of a residential dwelling.

But the crowing law is rarely enforced and violators less often prosecuted.

One of Luna’s neighbors, Rolando Sanchez, was raised in the federal district of Mexico City. Even there, in the nation’s capital, he said, it was common for people to keep chickens and roosters around the home.

But Sanchez, father of eight children, said he keeps a white hen that was given to him by a friend for practical reasons.

“It keeps the kids distracted for a little while,” he said with a shrug. “They feed it as if it were any other pet.”