SAUGUS — Chickens were a hot topic at Monday’s Board of Health meeting, as Director of Public Health John Fralick discussed animal regulation rules.
“What we’re trying to do is just shore up some of these regulations to make sure that we’re including things that are included in a number of different municipalities,” Fralick said.
Currently, there is no ban on roosters in the town. If a rooster is being a nuisance, the town is allowed to remove it from the area. However, the town is now looking to settle this situation by banning them.
“A number of municipalities in the area have long since banned roosters from being able to be permitted, and that’s due to a couple of reasons,” Fralick said.
One of the major reasons is the noise.
“When we come into a situation where there is a rooster involved with an animal keeper permit, we’ve come to find that it’s easy enough to cite the nuisance regulation just due to the fact that they’re loud,” he said.
Fralick continued that when there is pushback to the nuisance enforcement, they have to prove that the rooster is causing a general nuisance on a frequent basis.
“One other thing that we’ve also come to see with some of our animal permit holders is the addition of more and more animals due to having a rooster,” he said.
Fralick explained that the addition of a rooster makes it difficult for the town to regulate the population.
“The situation that we’re seeing is some permit holders have five chickens one year and then 20 chickens the next year, all because they introduced a rooster into the flock,” he said.
He continued by saying that they are looking into a number of different properties that just have too many animals.
“We want to make sure we have a good finger on the pulse of the actual number of animals that folks are owning. We have 47 different permits that we give out in town. 37 are primarily chickens,” Fralick said.
The board will be scheduling an initial public hearing on March 3 about the regulations and will be notifying all of the permit holders so that they can be present for the meeting with any questions or comments.
