ADELE FERGUSON - Bremerton voters could decide on chickens

IT’S ONLY ANOTHER week or so before residents of Bremerton learn whether they’ll get to vote in November on being allowed to keep four hens as pets.

Yes, I know people in Bremerton who already have chickens, some more than four. In fact, one of my doctors has chickens in his back yard where he has a continuing battle with raccoons over beating them to the eggs.

But somehow the question was raised here whether chickens are legally pets, rather than just barnyard fowl who belong on a farm. Chicken lovers asked the Bremerton City Council to OK them as pets but the council chickened out — sorry — on the decision and told the bird lovers to get 2,500 signatures to put it on the Nov. 3 ballot for everybody to decide. They have until Aug. 3.

According to a recent story in the Seattle Times, the same kind of thing is going on in Vancouver, B.C., where they also are considering allowing four hens per yard. What with the depression and all, particularly where mom and or dad have lost their jobs, raising chickens has almost become a national pastime. The Wall Street Journal, of all things, had a long article a week or so ago offering designs for attractive chicken coops. I thought the one they pictured looked more like an outhouse but the flowers painted on it were pretty.

SO WHAT’S WRONG with chickens as pets? Really, nothing, it’s their boyfriends who are undesirable. Hens may cackle a little when they lay an egg but roosters feel it is their obligation to greet each morning with a rip roaring cock-a-doodle-doo which can be heard for blocks if not miles, depending on who was awakened by it at 4 a.m. or thereabouts.

I used to raise chickens, also turkeys, even guinea hens. People in the south keep guinea hens not only for their meat, which is all dark, no white, and for their usefulness in case anybody comes sneaking around your house at night looking perhaps to steal chickens. They can just raise a helluva racket.

Unfortunately, when my dog Danny Dobbins knocked off a few guinea hens one day, my dad shot him. Another memory of my childhood was when the local police chief in Caruthersville, Mo., called on us to inform my dad that “Sgt. Ferguson, your hired man and my hired man have stolen your chickens.”

The thieves had, as usual, taken the chickens to local grocery stores and sold them. You bought your chicken on the hoof in those days. Since my brothers and sisters each had pet chickens among the haul, it was easy for my mother to go to the store and identify Bonnie and Red and Yellowtail and the rest of them because we had names for all of them.

SUNDAY ALWAYS was a tough day to get through because we usually had roast chicken for dinner and you knew that eventually your pet chicken would be the one on the menu. Tears didn’t help although you weren’t required to watch the hatchet come down.

Sunday across the street at the Lumsdens was different. They had chicken on Sunday too but their maid used to twist the bird’s head off. The fascination was in watching the headless chicken flop around afterward.

If you do raise chickens, name them after somebody you don’t like so you won’t feel bad when they quit laying and there’s a call for roast chicken.

When Rep. Len Sawyer was Speaker of the House, he had a piranha in a fish tank in his office and fed live fish to it that he named for the reporters. We reporters also were honored by Dixy Lee Ray, who named pigs after us.

If I had four hens, I’d name them Nancy, Ariana, Helen and Barbara.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)