Honolulu Lite
Chickens in neighborhoods
should be shrink-wrappedI once lived in a small town. (All together now: HOW SMALL WAS IT?) It was so small, we only had a 3-H Club. But even members of a 3-H Club could tell the difference between a pet and food. I never belonged to a 3- or 4-H Club. But I went to plenty of county fairs where the 4-Hers entered their livestock in contests. These were cows and pigs and such that the kids had raised for a year and no doubt got really close to. Probably even gave the critters names. But they knew all along that the animals were not pets. They were future steaks and burgers and bacon strips. And though a few tears were naturally shed, both by the livestock and their young handlers, the animals were auctioned off and sent on to meet their destiny.
I bring this up because the Honolulu City Council is about to pass a bill that designates chickens as farm animals, not pets. This comes after years of agonizing over what to do about noisy chickens and roosters that are kept as "pets" in residential neighborhoods.
I don't know why it took so long to figure out that chickens are not pets. A simple rule of thumb for determining whether an animal is a pet or not is to ask yourself this question: Would it taste good with teriyaki sauce? If the answer is yes, than that creature is food, not a pet. Examples: pig (yes), cat (no), cow (yes), dog (most breeds -- no), hamster (yes), gecko (no), chicken (BIG yes) and mynah bird (no).
That isn't to say that some people don't keep certain animals as pets when they shouldn't. (How's that for a complicated sentence? Translation: Some people have weird pets.)
One of them was state legislator Connie Chun, who in the 1980s kept Sooey, a pig the size of Molokai, as a "pet" in her back yard. Her neighbors were outraged and, if I recall, Chun became the sue-ee in the end. Or maybe she had a big campaign fund-raising luau and Sooey became the guest of honor. That was too many brain cells ago.
THE POINT IS that even back then, most people knew that pigs were not pets; they were just one of the items on a lunch wagon mixed plate. It's taken a long time for Honolulu to figure out that chickens are farm animals, not pets. But we reached that conclusion not to increase the gross state supply of chicken nuggets, but to regulate noise and perfume d' poultry in residential neighborhoods.
The truth of the matter is that chickens are messy animals and people don't keep them as pets; they keep them to lay eggs. And they don't keep roosters as pets; they keep them for armed combat or to amuse the egg producers. My father-in-law kept chickens, and we got a lot of eggs from him, or rather, them. But he kept his chickens in a valley well away from neighbors, not to mention his own house.
The new law will force people to keep their chickens 300 feet from neighboring property. That will effectively bar anyone from having "pet" chickens in residential neighborhoods.
This is what is referred to in textbooks concerning the march of civilization as "progress." A civilization can be measured by the number of livestock it is acceptable to have in one's yard. With this bold stroke by the City Council, Honolulu finally joins the league of cities whose animal restrictions defined the modern 19th century.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com