Crowing pains go before council
By Treena Shapiro
Advertiser Staff Writer
Every day at 3 a.m. the cacophony begins. Roosters crowing, one after another, for hours on end.
It continues even as Keith Williams leaves for work four hours later.
Williams, 33, has lived in the same house in an older Kapolei neighborhood for 10 years. He said the roosters began moving in about a year ago.
"Every day, I have to get up and I hear them," he said. "In the morning time, it's constant. On the weekends they stop crowing probably about 8 or 9 a.m."
Five of his neighbors have two birds apiece. The closest live about 30 feet away from his bedroom window.
"Throughout the neighborhood, I'd probably say about 40 percent of them have (chickens)," Williams said.
Williams said calling the police hasn't helped. Neither has going to court.
In frustration, he asked City Council Chairman John DeSoto to introduce a bill that would essentially ban chickens from residential neighborhoods. Bill 71 will be heard at the full City Council meeting next Wednesday.
DeSoto declined to comment until he hears from the public.
The bill would reclassify chickens as farm animals and require their enclosures to be set back at least 300 feet from any adjoining residential, resort apartment or apartment mixed-use zoning district.
"To me they're just a farm animal without any other purpose but to walk around the farm and crow and raise little chickens," Williams said.
In residential areas, roosters are most likely raised for cockfighting, Williams said. "There's no other reasons to have roosters in residential neighborhoods."
While putting an end to cockfighting isn't his first priority, Williams pointed out that moving the roosters out of residential neighborhoods would make it harder for their owners to train them. "It would create more of a problem for them to fight them if they don't have them right there in their yard where they can pick them up," he said.
The noise issue isn't a new one. In 1995, Councilman Duke Bainum introduced a bill that would have limited chickens in Palolo, but the bill was never heard in committee.
More recently, the Aliamanu/Salt Lake/Foster Village Neighborhood Board fielded similar complaints at their January meeting.
Jane Ross, a member of the Kapolei/Makakilo/Honokai Hale Neighborhood Board since its creation, said she doesn't remember the chicken issue ever being raised before the board.
However, after living in the same neighborhood as Williams for 34 years, she agrees that they are a nuisance. "I've witnessed a growing problem," she said. "At one time I had them behind my house and it was just unbearable. These roosters don't just crow in the morning as you think roosters do — they crow during the night, too."
Ross also blames cockfighting. "It's this whole gambling thing. It's a big problem, and I don't know how we're going to get rid of them."
She has heard other people complain that in addition to the crowing roosters, chicks have taken to running all over other people's property.
Eve Holt, spokeswoman for the Hawaiian Humane Society, did not comment on the proposed bill because it is not an animal welfare issue. She said, however, that the Humane Society received 4,100 calls about crowing roosters between July, 1, 2001, and June 30, and responded to 362 of those complaints.
The Honolulu Police Department, which has taken over the animal nuisance complaints, had no position on the bill.
Reach Treena Shapiro at tshapiro@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8070.
