Amanda Rancourt was facing a predicament.

She had started raising chickens in response to rising egg prices. But last May, a clutch of baby chicks she was raising in her backyard had grown up. Unexpectedly, one of the supposedly all-female chickens had a surprise for Rancourt.

The chicken turned out to be a rooster.

Rancourt knew what that meant. She could keep the chickens. But she lives in Barre City.

The rooster would have to go.

“It’s unfortunate. I literally live on the Barre City, Barre Town line,” she said. “It just kind of stinks we weren’t able to keep him, legally.”

Over the past few years, complaints across Vermont municipalities regarding roosters and their chatter have spurred many towns to ban them within their borders. Ordinances banning roosters have been in place in Burlington, South Burlington, Williston and Essex Junction for years. Yet regulations are not consistent, even between neighboring communities. The town of Barre, where Rancourt lives, has rooster regulations, while just up the road, the city of Montpelier does not.

As winter finally lets up and backyard flocks begin stirring from their coops, Vermont municipalities are increasingly saying “no” to roosters, creating a patchwork of local regulations that routinely pit the state’s agricultural heritage against suburban quality of life.

More communities have begun considering new bans. Last fall, the St. Albans City Council unanimously voted to ban roosters, with the threat of daily fines and possible court-ordered removal if a rooster is not moved, according to officials. A series of noise complaints regarding roosters crowing around the city had pushed the government to look at restrictions, St. Albans Mayor Tim Smith said. 

Urban density fueled the complaints, with most residents living just 30 feet apart. And perhaps a blind spot in the city’s animal control laws helped the backyard chickens proliferate, said Chip Sawyer, St. Albans’ planning director and author of the proposed ordinance.

“A barking dog, you can deal with,” Sawyer said. “You can order someone with a barking dog to keep their dog inside. You can’t really order a rooster to be kept inside the home.”

The new rule drew little resistance. Only one family with a pet rooster complained, Smith said.

“To have some one person feel that his activities, his hobbies, whatever you want to call it, take priority over his neighbors is, in my opinion, very selfish,” Smith said. 

Meanwhile, a similar dispute between neighbors in Shelburne prompted the town to debate adopting its own restrictions on roosters. 

“They start yodeling at dawn and go on until dark,” wrote Ruth Hagerman, a Shelburne resident, in an email to town government representatives that was shared with VTDigger. 

“They are disturbing the peace of those around them and are providing a textbook example of how neighborly policing doesn’t work.”

Yet after debating a drafted law, which was based on ordinances in neighboring municipalities, the Shelburne selectboard decided during a meeting last year to keep things as they were. 

Shelburne Town Manager Matt Lawless was wary of overregulating how residents raise animals and produce their own food.

“We need to be cautious, I think, in when we deal with nuisance or when we’re concerned about health and safety, that we also look at the positive value provided, and we not make it hard for people to do things that are good,” Lawless said.

A ban on roosters felt too controlling, according to Shelburne board member Andrew Everett. He felt that for Shelburne, a community that is a mix of suburban and rural, changing traditional Vermont ways should be resisted until absolutely necessary.  

Meanwhile, Williston’s war over backyard chickens has now spanned nearly a decade, with residents on smaller properties twice rebuffed in their efforts to keep hens. The city still classifies chickens as livestock, prohibited on any lot under an acre. The most recent attempt to lift the ban died in September 2023. Selectboard members who had previously supported the ban again voted to peel the chicken provisions off a broader housing package, shelving them indefinitely.

Chicken bans in Williston have survived at least two attempts to overturn them, the most recent in 2023. Photo by Al Frey/Williston Observer

The trend of banning roosters from Vermont municipalities has caused a somewhat unintended wrinkle: what happens to the roosters?

The growing number of roosters that need to be re-housed has become an issue, said Pattrice Jones, cofounder of VINE Sanctuary in Springfield, an animal sanctuary that assists in rescuing roosters. 

Sanctuaries around the state have been overwhelmed with requests to take roosters, Jones said. Chicks from hatcheries and farm stores that unexpectedly turn out to be roosters — and misconceptions about roosters being inherently violent — add to the problem.

But the growing list of local ordinances banning roosters has resulted in even more requests to take them in, adding to VINE’s “perpetual” waiting list, Jones said. 

For many, emotional attachment to their roosters complicates the decision of what to do with the feathered pets. 

“We hand raised them from when they were chicks and my kids were attached to them,” said Rancourt, the Barre chickens owner. 

After a few months of looking, she was able to find a more rural home for her rooster, away from the suburban neighborhoods and the rooster ban in Barre. 

“We understand that if they ended up becoming a problem with people, that they may end up having to cull them and eat them,”. 

“Personally I couldn’t do that.”