Liv Perry was taking a walk in her Wisconsin hometown when she found Consuela – sunburned, dazed and hungry – picking her way through a trash dump for scraps of food.
Consuela also didn't have any feathers, which wouldn't have been a problem except for the fact that she was a hen.
Consuela has since been featured in an independent documentary, "Mad City Chickens," about urban hens and their keepers that is showing at Sacramento's Guild Theater tonight and Sunday, with other showings this weekend in Davis and San Francisco.
"A lot of the film is a how-to on chicken-keeping," said co-director Tashai Lovington. "But some would say Consuela is the star of the show."
The Sacramento screenings are being hosted by CLUCK – the Campaign for Legalizing Urban Chicken Keeping – a group that's collecting signatures and lobbying City Council members in hopes of lifting Sacramento's ban on keeping chickens within the city limits.
Lovington's own experiences in Wisconsin inspired her to write the film.
"When we had chickens in the late '90s in Madison, we didn't know it was illegal," she said.
Then she read an article about chicken-keepers hiding their birds in what she called "a kind of underground city coop."
CLUCK hopes to gain support for its cause from their affiliation with Lovington and co-director Robert Lughai.
"People kept chickens anyway, so at first it was a 'who cares' situation," said Jaclyn Hopkins, CLUCK's volunteer co- coordinator.
Paul Towers, one of CLUCK's founding members, said he was inspired to do something when he started hearing stories about his neighbors "living in fear" over their chickens.
"One man's neighbor's dog ate all of his chickens," Towers said. "But because he wasn't supposed to be keeping them, he couldn't say a thing."
As for Towers himself: "Do I keep chickens? No comment."
Dan Roth, City Councilman Ray Tretheway's district director, says his boss is a CLUCK supporter and hopes to get what Roth called the city's "messy code" concerning backyard livestock sorted out.
Tretheway's District 1 includes downtown, the River District, South Natomas and North Natomas.
The main issue, Roth said, has been worry over "too many chickens running wild around the city."
Repeated attempts to get comment from other councilmembers or their staff members, uh, laid an egg.
Advocates say inner-city birds are often kept in low-income areas where people depend on the cheap source of daily protein.
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