“I didn’t want to start a war. I just wanted to keep chickens.”

Bobbi Wilkey is a homeschool mom who found herself in the crosshairs of a battle with three of the four notorious Commissioners of Catoosa County who were denied a place on the Republican ballot last year due to their un-Republican behavior. 

Bobbi moved to Tunnel Hill with her husband in 2020 to escape the harmful leftist policies destroying California. They are refugees seeking a more free, simple, family-friendly life. 

Bobbi has five school-aged children. She spends her days around the kitchen table in their suburban Catoosa County home, teaching her children and feeding them nutritious food. When she is not there, she is usually by the side of birthing women, working as a doula or teaching roller skating. 

“We were super excited to live where there were lots of conservative people,” Bobbi said.

Bobbi knew nothing about the Catoosa County commissioners, and didn’t set out to be any kind of political activist or culture warrior. The war came to her – to her front door. 

On April 19th 2022 Bobbi was anxiously awaiting a violation notice from the Catoosa County government. It was 8:00 am and she had just learned from a neighbor that a zoning official was on his way to give notice of a violation to the Wilkey family regarding their backyard chickens.

Bobbi sprang into action. 

By 8:30 she had all the chickens packed up and removed from the house to a big dog kennel on a friend’s farm. Then she and her children waited in the homeschool room with bated breath, uncertain about the fate of their pets. 

Then it happened. But there was no inspection, no altercation. Just a slip of paper silently taped to the door that charged them with having “Non-domesticated animals in a residential zone” and a handwritten addition “chickens”.

“Our chickens had to be removed in 10 days or we would have a $1,000 fine for every day we kept them. But they didn’t even inspect to see if we had chickens!”

The Wilkey’s backyard looked like it belonged to the quintessential suburban family. Completely fenced off with a play set, a couple garden boxes, and a small chicken coop. It was half an acre and the property was zoned residential, but bordered a 100 acre cow pasture. 

They later learned that the violation notice was the result of one complaint email being sent to the Catoosa County zoning authorities.

“It was just one angry lady, and I had never had a bad interaction with her,” said Bobbi.

One of the children had accidentally left the door of the chicken coop ajar, and a chicken temporarily escaped the coop and was quickly returned, but not before being observed by a neighbor.

Unlike a nuisance ordinance, which requires three people to sign affidavits to warrant someone coming out to your house to give a warning, the Wilkey’s lost their chickens and got entangled in this controversy as a result of one email.

“I was completely blind-sided. Before buying chickens, we had asked all our direct neighbors if it would bother them if we got chickens. They were fine with it.”

THE COMMISSIONERS

“That’s when I went to my first Commissioners meeting.” 

Bobbi brought her family and explained that she didn’t even have chickens on her property at the time the violation was issued. Furthermore, she argued that chicken ownership is objectively good. It is not criminal or immoral. Families have raised yard fowl on their private property for thousands of years. It gives children chores by which they can contribute to the family economy, and it teaches them responsibility. It helps with pests and provides fertilizer. 

Producing your own food is a fundamental human freedom and one would think the benefits would be apparent, especially to commissioners who claimed to be Republicans. Isn’t that the party of freedom, capitalism, and family values?

“I have five small children. Inflation has hit our family so hard. Food is expensive to feed our children, and we would really love to have a few backyard chickens.”

Even Bobbi’s children spoke before the commissioners.