The meeting was opened by Dr. Emerson, who explained that the Sanitary Bureau had received more than 14,000 complaints on account of chickens since the first of the year. Furthermore, he asserted that inspectors were occupied one-third of their time investigating applications for permits to keep chickens, or complaints about them. He then started to read some of the hundreds of letters of complaint on the subject of chickens, when one of the owners interrupted:
“I don’t think it’s fair to take up our time with letters of complaint, because we already know what’s in them. We want to find out what’s the best the Department of Health can do for chicken raisers.”
A member of a delegation from Sheepshead Bay said that the proposed seventy-five-foot limit would entirely wipe out chicken raising in his section, and he believed it would have the same effect in other suburban districts. He said:
“I have a plot 100 by 100 feet, and my house is constructed so that it would be impossible for me to keep chickens in accordance with the seventy-five-foot limit. The average suburbanite lives on a plot 50 by 100 feet.”
The suggestion that the new limit would practically eliminate the chicken industry from this city, brought forth a chorus of groans not unlike that of Sing Sing when a convict is led from the death house to the electric chair.
Dr. Emerson was the target for a score of different questions from every part of the room, and, as the best way out of the difficulty, he asked all who had killed chickens on their plots to raise their hands.
“Don’t you do it; you’ll be fined,” was the warning shouted by one of the chicken owners, and this was the signal for another series of groans.
It took the Deputy Health Commissioner some little time to restore order and to explain to the men and women that no police officers were present to start proceedings against offenders of the anti-chicken-slaughtering regulations.
One of the chicken raisers pointed out that the law was absurd in that it said that a chicken coop could not be kept within seventy-five feet of a factory.
“Is a chicken going to harm a factory?” he asked.
Dr. Emerson then tried to tell the complaining chicken owners that milk-bottling works, on the sanitation of which depended the lives of thousands of babies, were among the “factories” protected by the regulation. He also said that there was no intent in the seventy-five-foot limit to discriminate against chicken owners any more than there was to discriminate against saloons, which are required to be 200 feet removed from the nearest church or school. Here he was interrupted: