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that.
    â€œThere’s another thing about the cultures,” he adds. “They believe that if they have a live animal, kill it, butcher it, and eat it, it’s more fresh, and sometimes they will keep the live animal in the backyard until they want to eat it and sometimes the chicken gets away. Now, they reproduce like there’s no tomorrow—a mother will lay about twelve eggs—and it goes on and on, the cycle repeats, and before you know it we have thousands running around.”
    The final ingredient in Miami’s chicken problem is religion. “In Haitian culture you have the Voodoo religion and in the Spanish the Santería religion,” says Garry. “They all use the chickens for rituals. Sometimes they don’t kill them, they will just let them loose, and people don’t touch them because they think they might be part of a ritual.” But sometimes the chickens are killed. “After one sacrifice, the head was left downtown,” recalls Jill. “I had to go get the head. Miami-Dade County collects the dogs. We collect animals when they are dead.”
    Given the role chickens have in ritual, illegal cockfighting, and food, removing them doesn’t go down well with some residents—as I soon discover. Our final stop of the day is a run-down house with a backyard full of chickens and wiry kittens. We head in to see if there’s a way the birds can be flushed out of the yard and into the vacant land next door where they can be caught. Moments later, a Haitian man in grubby clothes appears. He is visibly angry.
    â€œYOU THERE! GET OFF MY PROPERTY!” he yells. “YOU COME HERE! I DON’T WANT YOU ON THE PROPERTY!”
    Garry tries to calm things down by introducing himself, but the man’s not having any of it. “YOU WANT TO BE MAD WITH ME? I’LL BE MAD WITH YOU!” he shouts, before turning on Vernon. “I SEEN YOU, I SEEN YOU A WHILE BACK. YOU CUSSED ME!”
    â€œI ain’t cussed nobody,” replies Vernon, who really doesn’t seem the cussing type. “I DON’T CARE!” grunts the man.
    Garry tries again. “We’re here to serve. We’ve got a job to do for the city—you’re a citizen—and we’re going to get them,” he explains, gesturing at the chickens digging up the yard. “The chickens, they get into the bush, they ransack the place. That’s why we’re here.”
    â€œTHEY DON’T DO THAT!” snaps the man as a rooster claws at the dirty soil behind him.
    â€œOK, they don’t do that to you. All right. Sir, you take care,” says Garry, winding up the conversation. We head back to the truck, stepping over roaming kittens while the man watches to make sure we move on. “They pulled that same move last time,” says Vernon. “They’re not the owners.”
    Does that happen a lot? I ask. “Oh yeah,” says Garry. “We’ve gone out to areas and gentlemen will come out and say, ‘What is it that you’re doing? Don’t touch my pets.’”
    But times are changing. Little Haiti is gentrifying, and a divide has opened up among residents over the chickens. “There was no tendency of reporting your neighbor for having chicken in the backyard, because it was a normal thing,” says Garry. “Now it is an issue, because people are really in tune with taking care of their homes, making them look beautiful, but with chickens running around that’s not going to happen, because whatever you plant, once they get in, within minutes you have mayhem.”
    I ask Garry if he thinks the team is winning the battle against the chickens. “I would more or less say that we win, because we have chickens to last us our careers,” he says with a smile. “At least until the public themselves come to a consensus of we don’t want this. But right now you have a portion who are feeding them, nurturingthem,