By Julieta Chiquillo
jchiquillo@neighborsgo.com

 

Henny Penny is a tiny little thing, weighing less than a pound.

She may be a full-grown bantam chicken at 2 years old, but in reality, she is Dominique Miller’s baby.

“Are you warm?” Miller coos to Henny Penny as she holds the miniature hen and strokes her feathers with her index finger. “Do you want some water?”

Unfortunately for Henny Penny, not everyone is a fan.

She and her six sisters —including one Silkie hen and a disabled chicken called Quasimodo — are not welcome in University Park, where the City Council on Jan. 17 decided to uphold a ban on backyard chickens despite lobbying by Miller and some of her neighbors.

The vote split the council 3-2 and ruffled feathers in the Miller household.

“I was pretty upset,” said Alice Mamula, Miller’s 16-year-old daughter. “For me, it’s such a lifestyle. They wouldn’t say you can’t have your dog or you can’t have your cat.”

Her mother said she hasn’t gotten over the shock after campaigning for months to revoke the ban, which was enacted in 2008.

“I’m just exhausted,” Miller said. “It’s so much.”

Fowl news

Miller, her husband and daughters had been keeping chickens in their University Park home backyard for more than two years when Miller discovered in 2011 that the hens violated a city ordinance.

Unwilling to part with her poultry, Miller appealed to the University Park City Council and later to the Urban Design & Development Advisory Committee, which was tasked with reviewing the matter and making a recommendation to the council.

Miller, a horse-riding instructor at Rocking M Stables in Dallas and a former preschool teacher, asked neighbors to sign a petition and contact City Council. She ordered about 100 T-shirts with a chicken on the back along with the words “Which came first…the chicken or the bubble?” and distributed them among her neighbors, friends, Rocking M students and Alice’s classmates.

Alice, a sophomore at Highland Park High School, found sympathetic ears on campus, including a skeptical teacher who later met the chickens.

“He thought it was so cool and that it was such a great idea,” Alice said.

Lesley Armstrong, a kindergarten teacher at Meadowbrook School in Dallas, knows how charming chickens can be. Armstrong, Miller’s former colleague at the preschool, uses an incubator to hatch chicken eggs in her classroom. Students learn about the chicken’s life cycle and take turns checking the incubator and caring for the chicks, which families then adopt as pets, Armstrong said.

“That’s the big excitement of coming to kindergarten,” Armstrong said with a laugh.

Out of cluck

The advisory committee recommended that the city lift the ban and adopt regulations common in other municipalities that are feather-friendly.

But Mayor Pro-Tem Jerry Grable said many residents he talked to were not on board with backyard chickens.

“A couple of the comments have been, ‘I didn’t move to University Park to live next door to chickens,’” Grable said at the meeting. “Another comment is that we’re an urban residential neighborhood and chickens don’t belong in our city.”

Miller, who grew up in a village 12 miles away from Bath, England, said farms are not the only homes for hens. She points at Dallas-area chicken coop tours as evidence of the rise of the urban chicken.

Backyard chickens are welcome in Dallas. But roosters are not.

The birds provide fresh eggs and entertain neighbors’ children, Miller said. Their clucking is not loud enough to disturb, she said, and their waste serves as fertilizer.

In some ways, chickens are easier pets than cats and dogs, said Miller, who also houses one feline and three canine friends.

Miller declined to disclose the whereabouts of her chickens. She is thinking of resuming her campaign when a new council is elected in May.

But, she says, she is not giving up.

“I don’t want these children, just their early memories to be of the fact that they have an iPad or they have an iPhone,” Miller said. “There’s more to life than that.”

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Julieta Chiquillo is a general assignment reporter for neighborsgo and can be reached at jchiquillo@neighborsgo.com or 469-330-5671.