Families Feud Over Just Who Rules The Roost

For optimum reading enjoyment, the opening of today’s column should be sung to the tune of the TV classic, “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

Come listen to my story ‘bout a man named Bill.

He says his neighbor’s wood stove was makin’ him ill.

Then ol’ Bill hatched a scheme to get back.

He bought himself a rooster and went on the attack.

Red, that is.

Rhode Island Red.

There’s a cock-a-doodle brouhaha being waged in the ‘burb boondocks of Nine Mile Falls.

Neighbors who once dined together and discussed carpooling to their jobs in the computer industry now are fried at each other.

“I’m inconsiderate with my roosters if he’s gonna be inconsiderate about his wood burning,” says Bill Pelloux, 48.

It’s like living “with an 8-year-old next door,” counters Eric Erickson, 56. “It takes a lot of self-discipline.”

The two live next to each other on Tormey Road. Their feathered fracas dates back to 1994. That year, the Ericksons bought an expensive, EPA-approved wood stove to supplement their costly electric heat.

Neighbor Pelloux urged Erickson to get rid of it. Erickson declined.

Pelloux is one of those hypersensitive former cigarette puffers who hate smoke in all forms. “I can see where it’s rather ironic,” he concedes. To this man, chimney emissions are a cancer-causing trespasser that comes and goes with the fickle winds.

Fuming over his neighbors’ log-burning ways, Pelloux stuck a caged rooster on his property near the bedroom windows of Erickson and his wife, Carol. The barnyard sound system is currently upgraded to stereo. Pelloux, who also has 17 hens, put another penned rooster near the front of the Erickson abode.

Like nature’s clockwork, the dumb clucks begin their unholy crowing at 15-second intervals a half-hour before dawn. They carry on like tone-deaf opera singers competing for the same part.

Neither earplugs nor double-paned windows filter out all of the ruckus, say the Ericksons. “I thought about getting myself hypnotized so that I’d like the sound,” adds a frustrated Carol.

The roosters - Jake and Peanuts - eventually tire of their infernal racket. During some quiet times, Erickson contends, Pelloux has been known to encourage encores by banging on metal panels in his yard.

Pelloux doesn’t deny the charge. “That’s no more irritating than him chopping wood,” he counters. “That gets under my skin, too.”

Pelloux turned in the Ericksons to county air pollution authorities to no avail. The couple’s stove was found in compliance. “It’s hideous to try to enjoy the outdoors when you can’t get away from the camp smoke,” grouses Pelloux.

Launching a counterattack, the Ericksons took their harassment claim to court. The commissioner hearing the case was understanding, says Erickson, but explained it was a waste of money to file a petition that, in all probability, wouldn’t be enforced.

Last week the couple asked Spokane County commissioners to add obnoxious roosters to the same noise ordinance that deals with barking dogs. Those elected officials aren’t about to go wading in that manure pond.

The Ericksons and the Pellouxs live in an area zoned for agriculture. Any law proclaiming roosters a potential noise nuisance would probably bring an army of angry farmers to the courthouse with pitchforks in hand.

“I have all the sympathy and empathy for them, but there are some things a commissioner can’t do,” says Commissioner Phil Harris, adding he knows what the Ericksons are going through. “I grew up around chickens. Those (roosters) are the loudest creatures on Earth.”

Pelloux says he’ll eighty-six his squawkers if the Ericksons eighty-six their stove. No deal, says Erickson, who is prepared to “let time take its toll and see where it leads.”

This may be a dispute only the late Col. Sanders could have solved.

, DataTimes