Many in live-and-let-live Key West hate their roosters.
Posted on 01/27/2002 7:47:49 PM PST by spiker
Many in live-and-let-live Key West hate their roosters.
KEY WEST, Fla., Jan. 24 — This is a tolerant place, usually. Greasy bikers in black leather and mirrored shades cruise their rumbling Harley-Davidsons down streets filled with college boys on pastel scooters. Tanned women in bikini tops and silver toe rings share sidewalks with sun-blasted old men in ragged T-shirts who walk their battered bicycles like wounded horses.
Under the palms, which sway in a perfect 80 degrees, low-slung silver sports cars sit at the curbs with heaps of rolling junk, and in the bars working fishermen tell deep- sea tales to vacationing anglers who swallow every word.
It is a mantra here: live and let live. There is room, even on an island just two miles long and four miles wide, for everyone and everything.
But the chickens have to go. Their love calls — and ill-timed wake-up calls — drift from banyan trees, back alleys and the parking lot of a Burger King, sometimes a throaty, passionate clucking, sometimes a strangled squawk. Cars crawl so roosters can strut across Petronia Street, and hens cluck over chicks in manure-smeared alleys behind galleries, candy shops and restaurants.
On Patterson Avenue, two shimmering orange and black gamecocks fight for the middle of the street, forcing Spike Dameron to leave his supper and break it up.
These chickens, Mr. Dameron, 80, said as he disappeared back into his house, "are getting out of hand." The screen door slammed behind him, as if to punctuate how he and many others feel about Key West's feral chickens.
Once just a quaint part of island culture, the chickens — descendants of those brought by settlers in the 1800's — have multiplied and become a nuisance. Residents say they are fed up with crowing at 3 a.m., manure- fouled beaches and oddly aggressive behavior.
Key West is not exactly overrun with feral chickens, as some residents contend. But it has begun catching them and moving them to the Florida mainland, in a kind of antichicken crusade designed to scale down what wildlife experts say is a chicken population of some 2,000.
This has led to clear battle lines in the community, and even a chicken safe house. Katha Sheehan, a kind- faced woman who cuddles even the fiercest gamecocks in her arms, runs the Chicken Store on Duval Street. "Chickens Are Safe Here," a sign over the door promises. She sells chicken paintings and crafts to pay for her outreach program. Chickens cluck from cages inside. She takes in roosters wounded by people who have tried to kill them, and others injured in cockfights, which are popular, though illegal, here.
The sign over the door to the Chicken Store makes clear whose side its manager is on in the dispute over whether Key West has too many chickens.
"I fell in love with these chickens," said Ms. Sheehan, who finds good homes for them. She has opposed the en masse relocation as inhumane.
Some residents say the squabble over the chickens is just one more sign of a relentless gentrification of this tourist city of some 28,000 permanent residents, where T-shirt shops and theme restaurants have replaced ramshackle dives, and single-story shotgun houses with a view of nothing at all sell for $360,000.
"I like the sound of roosters in the morning," said Richard Hatch, an owner of Blue Heaven, a Key West restaurant where chickens, sleeping in the branches of trees over the dinner crowd and pecking under the tables at breakfast, have long been a restaurant draw. "What brings people down here is the funkiness," Mr. Hatch said. "But we are victims of our own popularity." People who can afford houses worth millions do not want outlaw chickens in their trees, some residents say.
Over the last six months or so, a partnership of city officials and wildlife experts has rounded up about 650 chickens and shipped them to farms on Florida's west coast.
City officials have said they want to relocate about 1,000 of the chickens to farms on the mainland, where the chickens can live out their lives in a kind of chicken exile. They are not sent to slaughterhouses. Only their eggs are harvested.
John Jones, the assistant city manager in Key West, is responsible for the roundup. He calls it "deporting" the unwanted poultry.
The chickens are not harmed in the process, but many Keys residents are convinced it is a cruel practice.
Others just want them gone — and a dead chicken is about as gone as a chicken can get.
"About half the town will kill you if you kill one," said Mr. Jones, who is an engineer when he is not embroiled in chicken projects. "The other half will kill you if you don't."
It is not just a matter of swelling population, but a change in the physical makeup of the island itself that has thrown the chickens into conflict with residents.
Hurricane Georges in 1998 stripped a great deal of the island's tree cover and drove the chickens from neighborhoods where they had lived more or less peacefully.
Suddenly, they were in alleys in tourist areas and in parking lots. "Parts of the town that didn't have chickens before have got them now," Mr. Jones said.
Their droppings began to wash into the surrounding shallows and pollute the water, he said.
The alley behind Sue Michel's candy store is specked with chicken manure. Two roosters vie for Ms. Michel's back lot. "I've been attacked by the males twice," she said.
She called city officials for help in September, but they have not gotten to her problem yet, she said.
Many residents would not mind the chickens if they clucked and crowed in the mornings — just in the mornings.
Some people have grown so frustrated that they have tried to get rid of the chickens on their own.
"My sister-in-law took a shot at one with a spear gun," said John Petzold, a waiter.
To listen to people talk, it would seem that entire chicken armies are goose-stepping down the streets. But while it is easy to spot chickens a few at a time — the roosters travel alone — there are no legions of feathered troublemakers in the streets.
But the chickens are there, said Sandy Castro, a sales clerk at the Cuba Cuba art and gifts shop on Duval Street. They may even know the authorities are after them, Ms. Castro joked. "They're smart," she said.
In fact, as dusk settles on Key West, it seems as if the chickens are everywhere. A lone rooster, like a scout, darts across the road — no one knows why they cross the road — and jerks his head up and down, like a periscope. It may be that roosters are just naturally suspicious. It may be, as some residents say, that they know they are on the lam.
Sue Michel, the shop owner who was twice attacked by roosters and has not been satisfied with the city's progress, says she may have to handle the situation herself. "I just got a new turkey fryer," she said.
With regard to Key West? Certainly! Can't let those chickens and roosters get in the way of the gentrification going on down there! Especially since most of those new places will have that cute little rainbow flag flying proudly!
To die. In the rain.
These people never cease to amaze me! Relocating chickens is 'inhumane' but don't even think about taking away their right to murder babies anytime, anywhere they choose.
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