By GLEN WERLING
Will the chickens come home to roost in Ossian?
Members of the Ossian Town Council Monday evening heard a request from East Mill Street residents Michael and Emily Diss to either eliminate the term fowl from the Ossian Ordinance 94.02, which sets rules for the town’s citizens regarding the keeping and harboring of animals, or set limits on what fowl may be kept.
The Disses have chickens — six hens to be exact — and they’ve had them for two years. A couple weeks ago, a Diss family member accidentally left a gate open to their privacy-fenced back yard.
The chickens started to do what chickens do. They were curious about the big and bright new world that had just been opened before them. They crossed the road, they made their way to the backyards and front yards of neighbors — and subsequently the police were called because the Disses had been so good about keeping their chickens that several of the neighbors didn’t even know they had chickens behind the high walls of their privacy fence.
Two Ossian police officers rounded up the fleeing fowl and returned them to the Disses — with this caveat: they couldn’t keep them on their 410 E. Mill St. property because domesticated chicks and ducks and geese are not allowed in town.
The Disses then became determined to change that.
They’d like to live on a farm, Emily Diss explained, but they can’t afford that right now. So, instead they are trying to bring a little of the farm into town.
Emily Diss stressed in a prepared statement that she read to the council members that chickens are not dirty, not smelly and not loud. The Disses compost the manure that the chickens make and spread it on their backyard garden, Michael Diss added.
The Disses proposed a compromise in the ordinance, one that will permit perhaps up to six hens but no roosters. Other fowl would be considered foul.
The ordinance could retain its prohibitions against pigs, cattle, sheep, llamas, goats and horses.
(There is a family on West LaFever Street that does have horses, but they had them before the ordinance was created so those animals were grandfathered into the ordinance.)
Council members Josh Barkley, Brad Pursley, Jeff Kemper, Jason House and Dennis Ealing took a thousand-mile look at the issue.
What happens if they make an exception to the ordinance and not everyone is as discreet or careful with the tending of their chickens as the Disses have been? That’s a question they asked themselves and the Disses.
Michael Diss noted that other towns around Ossian — including Bluffton — permit backyard chickens. He suggested that the council see how the Parlor City handles its issues with chickens. The council members agreed to do that.
Diss also added that while the chickens also teach his children about responsibility and serve as their 4-H projects, he did not believe that suddenly once the ordinance is amended that everyone would go out and load up their backyards with chickens. Not very many people are going to want to have that kind of responsibility, he thought.
Several council members had asked around town to people they knew what they thought about chickens in town. Barkley said his responses were pretty evenly divided — if the people he asked were young, they didn’t really care one way or the other. If they were older, it was an unequivocal “no.”
Barkley suggested — and the other council members agreed — that the Disses should return to the council’s July 11 meeting. A month’s time should give them enough information to make a decision one way or the other, he thought.
While the council members want and are eager for the public’s input on the issue, Barkley was concerned that it could become as divisive as so many other topics have become today and the council could unleash a barrage of berating if it makes a decision one way or the other.
glenw@news-banner.com
