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UPDATE: Maurice the noisy French cockerel is free to keep on crowing

AFP
AFP - [email protected]
UPDATE: Maurice the noisy French cockerel is free to keep on crowing
Corinne Fesseau, left, with Maurice and his supporters outside court. Photo: AFP

A rowdy rooster named Maurice can continue his noisy crowing after a judge rejected a lawsuit filed by unhappy neighbours, the lawyer in the case has announced.

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Maurice's owner, Corinne Fesseau, told a court in Rochefort, western France, in July that nobody else had complained about the noise at her home on the picturesque island of Oleron, except a couple of retired summer vacationers.

She faced having to either move or silence her noisy charge, but the judge on Thursday rejected her neighbours' complaint, meaning that Maurice can carry on crowing.

Her lawyer Julien Papineau said that the neighbours must also pay €1,000 in damages.

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Corrine Fesseau with her noisy cockerel. Photo: AFP

The case quickly ballooned into a national cause celebre, with 140,000 people signing a "Save Maurice" petition or proudly displaying his picture on "Let Me Sing" T-shirts.

Critics saw the lawsuit as part of a broader threat against France's hallowed rural heritage by city dwellers unable or unwilling to understand the realities of country life.

"This is the height of intolerance - you have to accept local traditions,"Christophe Sueur, the mayor in Fesseau's village of Saint-Pierre-d'Oleron, told AFP.

The couple's lawyer, Vincent Huberdeau, rejected any city-versus-country comparison, saying his clients lived in an area of the town, population 7,000, that is zoned for housing.

"It's not the countryside," he said.

The trial is the latest in a long history of tensions between locals and holiday-home owners in rural France, which underscored the fierce "yellow vest" anti-government protests that erupted last November.


Dominique Douthe, 67, has been taken to court over the noise from her ducks. Photo: AFP

In May, the mayor of the southwestern village of Gajac, Bruno Dionis,penned a furious open letter in May in defence of the rights of church bells to ring, cows to moo, and donkeys to bray throughout rural France.

Dionis du Sejour has asked the government to inscribe the sounds on France's heritage list.

Maurice and his owner are not the only ones ruffling feathers. This week a woman in the duck-breeding heartland of the Landes region was brought to court by a newcomer neighbour fed up with the babbling of the ducks and geese in her back garden.

A petition in support of "the Hardy ducks," as they have been dubbed, after the name of a nearby lake, has garnered some 5,000 signatures.

"More and more people are heading to rural areas, not to work in agriculture but to live there," Jean-Louis Yengue, a geographer at the University of Poitiers, told AFP.

"Everyone is trying to defend their territory."

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