Alarcon and the Rooster

These are the dog days, the sultry, uncomfortable time of an early summer that can leave a guy feeling edgy and ready for a fight.

They start off a cool gray then gradually burn brighter and wetter and, while not quite an afternoon in Miami, they aren’t the kinds of days that make you want to love your neighbor or his damned rooster.

That’s one reason, I suppose, why Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon is crying fowl, I mean foul, over the mini-barnyard of the guy who lives a few doors away. It isn’t just the dog days, it’s the cock-a-doodle-doo days.

Complaining neighbors aren’t exactly big news in the big city. You don’t have to open a whorehouse next door to get someone, or a whole lot of someones, demanding redress.

They’ll march in the street to oppose a new church down the block, bitch about chirping canaries and call the police to report an old lady giving piano lessons in her garage.

The difference between those complainers and a guy like Alarcon, however, is that the malcontents usually only make a lot of noise. When you’re a member of the City Council, you introduce a motion to pass a law.

That’s exactly what Alarcon has done. He’s asking for an ordinance to restrict the noise of roosters and other barnyard animals because the crowing of a neighbor’s pets in the East San Fernando Valley is keeping him awake.

If it were gunfire robbing him of sleep we might end up with a serious war on gangs in the city, but since it’s roosters, we get a war on chickens. It’s the personalization of annoyance that gets things done.

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The neighbor is a man named Rodrigo Martinez, who is not related to me. He has about 50 chickens, some of which are roosters. Roosters, being what they are, occasionally crow.

I know this as a fact because we owned a rooster once. His cock-a-doodle-dooing was generally accepted in the neighborhood except by one man who left me a note in my mailbox that said, “I am a f------ writer and your f----- rooster is robbing me of sleep in the morning!”

Well, I’m a f------ writer too, and it didn’t bother me so I did nothing about it. Then one day the rooster disappeared and there was a hole dug under the fence to indicate that a coyote or raccoon had taken it, except there were no feathers anywhere.

I suspected at first that my neighbor had staged the crime and stolen the rooster, but then I read something he’d written and realized he probably wasn’t capable of that kind of sophisticated deception.

Martinez, 27, a tire company employee, moved into Sylmar about six months ago because he figured that was a good place to raise both animals and children. He keeps the chickens as pets, food and egg-providers.

He says that no one, not even Alarcon, has complained to him personally about his roosters. He said he heard about the councilman’s annoyance through visits by people from both Animal Control and Building and Safety, who ultimately decided he was doing nothing illegal.

Alarcon was attempting other means to get rid of the roosters, but when they didn’t work, he introduced the anti-rooster ordinance, regulating farm animals the same way the city already cracks down on barking dogs.

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Even though Martinez has two acres of land, Alarcon suggested that it isn’t the proper environment for roosters. Martinez replied that he had practically built condos for the animals and doesn’t know what in the hell Alarcon is talking about. Neither do I.

I did some checking in the neighborhood, whose combination of paved streets and dirt roads add to its semirural nature, and found that other homes have chickens and some have peacocks. There are also horses, cows and goats in the general vicinity surrounding Alarcon’s house.

All those animals seem to exist happily in whatever environment is available, and Martinez’s roosters probably feel the same way.

“There’s more noise from the freeway around here than from my roosters,” Martinez said. I stood in front of his house listening to both the roosters and the Golden State Freeway, and he’s right.

Walter Prince, a whimsical activist in the Valley, has organized Stop Nasty Animal Regulation Laws (S.N.A.R.L.) to help Martinez fight Alarcon and has distributed 3,000 fliers and petitions toward that end.

Alarcon is a good man, but I think he’s been spending too many dog days outdoors without a hat, which can short-circuit the brain’s synaptic connections and create the aforementioned crankiness.

Rather than pursue a law, I suggest he move to a place less rural where there are no roosters, only the bloody calamities of urban life, all of which require a lot more attention than a noisy cock-a-doodle-doo or two.

Al Martinez can be reached online at [email protected]