Maurice the French cockerel fancies himself as a bit of a crooner. Not quite like his famous namesake Maurice Chevalier, the late French balladeer; but still, each dawn, Maurice does what nature intended cockerels do: he crows.

His owner, Corinne Fesseau, who describes herself as a local singer on the Île d’Oléron, an island off France’s Atlantic coast, is used to Maurice’s early wake-up call.

But Fessau’s neighbours are not so enamoured, and have threatened legal action to silence Maurice for good.



Fesseau has launched a petition, currently signed by more than 32,000 people, to save the bird. “I was born on the Île d’Oléron and we’ve always kept chickens, well before residences were built behind our wall,” Fesseau writes.

“Of our two neighbours, just one – who comes only three times a year – cannot bear to hear our cockerel Maurice crowing … We have been contacted by these people to demand that we make him be quiet.”



Fesseau said she had tried shutting Maurice away for the night and lined his coop with egg boxes to absorb the sound “like they do in recording studios”. To no avail.



“The crowing is quieter, but the neighbours wrote to us to say that he began at 4am, which is false. I stayed awake next to the henhouse and I heard nothing,” she wrote. “At 6-6.30am, he knows it’s his hour to wake. Even when it’s dark he crows”.

Since then, Fesseau says she has received a legal notice claiming the noise is a health risk and threatening a lawsuit under various laws pertaining to public nuisances.

“Too many people go on holiday and complain about the noise of the cows, the dogs, the frogs, the churchbells … It’s not normal. These noises were there before they were; they should accept them,” she said.

“What do we ban next? The cooing of doves, the cries of the seagulls, the birds that chirp every morning?”



Fesseau has the support of the local mayor, Christophe Sueur, who urged Maurice’s critics to be more tolerant.



“If I have to make a local decree to protect a cockerel it will certainly be a first,” he told France Bleu radio. “I consider we are in a rural setting here and the crowing of the cockerel is part of that setting. Put simply, I will protect the cockerel in order to defend our way of life.”



In 1995, faced with a similar case that led to a death notice being served on a cockerel, a French appeal court declared it was impossible to stop a cockerel crowing. “The chicken is a harmless animal so stupid that nobody has succeeded in training it, not even the Chinese circus,” the judgment read.

