Chicken Keeper Runs A Fowl Of Authorities

Despite council regulations and his neighbour’s ongoing suffering, a local man vows to fight for his right to keep chickens with “beaks and claws at the ready.”

“This is the year of the Rooster and I’m turning 60 this year too,” Kristján Ingi Jónsson of Mosfellsbær, told RÚV after the Committee of Environmental Resources denied his appeal to invalidate previous rulings demanding he remove two roosters from his property. “I’ll fight for my roosters…This is just politics and abuse of power.”

In March of last year, the Board of Public Health for the District of Kjós where Kristján Ingi lives, demanded he apply for a license for his hens and was ordered to remove two roosters from his premises, in keeping with the county regulations on smallholding.

When Kristján Ingi failed to follow these orders the Board of Public Health further decreed that he needed a license for his henhouse which was technically a separate building and not part of his farmhold. Kristján Ingi disagreed vehemently.

Kristján Ingi’s neighbour meanwhile, has also been trying to get rid the roosters, filing complaints of his own for the roosters’ removal. In the complaints the neighbour cites four years of endless and disruptive crowing that seems to last all day without any respite. Four years.