I don't think a person's tolerance of noise has anything to do with whether they grew up in the country, live in the country now, or are basically a town person. A few years ago, a neighbour two doors away got chickens, including a cockerel, which was very loud and annoyed us when it constantly crowed all day, wrecking the peace of our quiet garden. We sleep at the front of our house, but if our bedroom had been at the back this bird would have also badly disturbed our sleep once the light mornings came. The neighbour next to the cockerel was driven nearly to a nervous breakdown by this bird. He could be heard out in his garden, loudly mimicking the bird's crowing and shouting at it SHUT UP!! SHUT UP YOU BLOODY BIRD!!!! Now this man was an air traffic controller, so it was pretty important he got his sleep and didn't go totally off the rails. It would have been funny if it wasn't so tragic, really - this man was suffering. Both of our families had lived there for many years, and the cockerel was imported by a new person to the road. It was such a relief when eventually they moved away, and someone else moved in with hens but no cockerel. As you know I'm very pro-chicken, and also I'm 'country-bred,' whatever that may mean, but if it got under my skin, no wonder it annoyed the rest of the road.
Yesterday I was out walking the dog and I could clearly hear a cockerel crowing from a farm 3 fields away. It sounded good, at that distance, across the fields, and it lives in a suitably isolated spot, but it's not the same if it's not your own bird, and it lives at very close quarters. Strange as it may seem, not everyone likes chickens, or can stand cockerels crowing incessantly, it has nothing to do with where you were brought up or where you have moved to. We can't all live 3 fields from anyone else on a smallholding somewhere. For the majority of us who have to live close to others in our tiny island, whether in town, village or country, it's good manners to control the level and type of noise which emanates from your property, whether we're talking about cockerels, dogs, parties, radios in the garden, screaming kids, motorbikes, guns or whatever. And ranting about 'townies' as if they were some subspecies of human being just shows ignorance and prejudice, in my opinion. Of course, before you move in, you make enquiries about what goes on in the neighbourhood. If someone moves next to a chicken breeder, they would be stupid to complain about the noise, just the same as if they moved next to a kennels or a railway line, but with so many people keeping a few chickens and then wanting to breed, a cockerel may pop up anywhere in someone's back garden, and to object to it because you can't stand the noise shouldn't be seen as failure to 'embrace the country way of life.'
