By Ken McCall
Warren County Bureau
DaytonDailyNews 03/20/99

Bobby Wayne Webb picks up a big gray rooster - one of 50 adults he's raising in the back yard of his 5-plus-acre spread in rural Butler County.

"To me, they're like my dogs," the 38-year-old Hamilton native said. "They're like my pets."

But to Webb's neighbors south of Oxford, the roosters - which sometimes number as many as 100 - are more like a nightmare. The neighbors say the roosters produce a near-constant din that drives them indoors and forces them to keep the windows closed no matter how nice the weather.

David Forrester, who lives about 700 feet up the hill from Webb, said the noise of the roosters is "just overwhelming."

"In the summertime, unless you go in your house and close your doors, you just can't get away from it," said Forrester, who with three other neighboring households brought a nuisance lawsuit against Webb and his roosters. "It's like Chinese water torture. It's there all the time."

Now the roosters' crowing threatens to be heard as far away as the Ohio Supreme Court.

Forrester and the neighbors filed a lawsuit in March 1996 in Butler County Common Pleas Court less than a year after Webb moved in and began buying roosters. They say he sells them for cock fighting, a claim Webb denies.

The lawsuit claimed the intensity of Webb's rooster ranch violated Riley Twp. zoning ordinances. That lawsuit was dismissed, however, because the property is 5.25 acres. Under Ohio law, agricultural uses cannot be restricted on properties greater than 5 acres.

But the neighbors reopened the lawsuit in April 1997, claiming the roosters constituted a "private nuisance," and despite the fact that Webb's property is zoned agricultural, Forrester and the neighbors won. Judge John Moser ruled in March 1998 that the rooster noise created a nuisance that outweighed Webb's right to "reasonable use" of his property.

Moser ordered that Webb get rid of all his roosters except those needed for propagation - a figure he set at five.

Webb and his attorney, James Cooney, appealed to the 12th District Court of Appeals in Middletown, but the court agreed last month that the roosters are a nuisance.

So Cooney and Webb now plan to appeal to the state Supreme Court. They have until April 2 to file.

Cooney calls the judges' decisions ridiculous and worries the case will set a precedent for agricultural uses all over the state.

"This is 100 percent zoned agricultural," Cooney said. "I have been to the place. I wouldn't want to live next door - but I know it's the country. I don't want to live by chickens and pigs and ducks."

What this is really about is young "gentrified" people moving to the country, Cooney says.

"The sole issue is the noise," he says. "They cockadoodle-do too much."

In Webb's defense, Cooney argued that raising roosters was a legitimate agricultural use, although Webb says he is not raising them as a business, but merely to show at county fairs.

But the neighbors presented evidence in the trial that Webb was actually raising the roosters for use in cock fights, which are illegal in Ohio. Barbara Houndchell, the real estate agent who helped Webb find the property, said he told her at the time he was looking for a place to breed fighting cocks to fight in Kentucky.

"The Court is of the opinion that is exactly what Webb is doing," Moser wrote.

Webb denies he is raising the roosters to fight. He shows off several ribbons but, as the judge noted, most of them aren't signed or have any dates. But he has one certificate from the Ohio Game Bird Association showing he won a prize at a show in Eaton on Aug. 16, 1998.

The reason he has to have so many roosters, he says, is they have to be perfect to win a prize.

"If they have one broken feather," he says, "it can hurt you."

Webb, who works in a concrete products factory, says he specifically asked the zoning officials before he bought the place if raising chickens would be a problem and they had assured him it wouldn't.

"I would have never moved here to start with if they'd have told me I couldn't have chickens," he says.

To appease the neighbors, Webb says he painted the homemade rooster huts a light green. He turned them a different direction. He installed an electrified fence and planted 20 small pine trees.

"I'm not a bad neighbor," he says.

Frank Trasker, who lives just east of Webb and whose bedroom window is about 50 yards from the roosters, doesn't agree.

Trasker, a 44-year-old who is disabled with a heart problem, was originally a party to the lawsuit but dropped out because he found it too stressful.

Not that the roosters aren't stressful.

"Some days it's just like a blast," he says. "They go and it's just constant - like every two seconds."

In fact, Forrester hired a consultant to count rooster crows over a two-day period. The man counted as many as 235 "discernible crowing starts" in one 10-minute period. And Webb, Forrester says, testified at the trial that he had only 25 roosters at the time. Averaging the results and projecting them for the 100 rooster sheds that are usually occupied, Forrester estimates Webb is responsible for 20,000 crows a day.

Forrester adamantly denies that he is a "yuppie" who can't stand farm noise. When he moved in 10 years ago, the farm behind him raised pigs and he never complained once. In fact, he says, he and his wife agreed to allow the farmers install a fat -rendering plant to increase profitability.

"I don't mind the tractors running all night or the smell of pigs," Forrester says, "but this is about gambling and abusing animals.

"He wants to raise an unlimited amount of fighting cocks. I'm telling you, he wouldn't do that if he cared about his neighbors."

CONTACT Ken McCall (513) 743-5309 or e-mail him at ken_mccall@coxohio.com