A lot of times, I think some things just go without saying, but apparently this is not always the case. For instance, I would assume it would go without saying that farm animals, livestock and exotic pets probably shouldn’t live in the middle of the City of Norwich, but I would be wrong.
I have no issue with the animals listed above. Currently, I live in the middle of a corn field, way out in the sticks. If my neighbor wanted to have cows, pigs, donkeys, sheep and an orangutan, I wouldn’t really care. I probably wouldn’t even know about it.
However, having the same animals in the city, causes some different problems. In the middle of a town, where houses are usually located fairly close to one another, it’s hard to have any animals that don’t occasionally bother your neighbors. Even if you only have dogs and cats, the dogs barking annoys people, and the cats walk on the hood of someone’s car and you’re suddenly the least popular person on the block.
Given all the problems you can have with regular house pets, it baffles me why anyone would want to bring farm animals into the mix, but apparently it happens. A couple weeks ago, the City of Norwich Common Council actually had to discuss a property located in the city that housed a goat. Later investigation revealed that it was not just a goat, but a family of goats and a baby cow that were in residence at a particular property. (Having seem some of the properties in town, I would believe that many of them were inhabited by animals, but apparently it was just this one.)
For the most part, the council’s conversation served as a source of amusement to me, but it probably wasn’t nearly as amusing to neighboring residents in the area. It seems like it is obvious that having several farm animals on a typical city lot is probably not going to go over well, but according to the city codes office, there is no ordinance against it.
After seeing a copy of the ordinance pertaining to animals in the city, I learned you can’t have a pig, or an exotic pet, and you can only use certain hitching posts to secure your horse. (Apparently the ordinance hasn’t been updated in a while, most likely because no one saw the need.)
So, although it seems like it would go without saying, you probably shouldn’t bring your goats, sheep, cows or ostriches to the City of Norwich, because even though it’s not expressly forbidden (yet), it probably won’t get you any new friends.