A woman who faced eviction after complaints about noise from her three emotional support parrots has been awarded enough money to buy plenty of crackers for Layla, Ginger, and Curtis. The Rutherford, a co-operative apartment building in Manhattan, has agreed to pay $165,000 to Meril Lesser in what the Justice Department says is the largest settlement of its kind.
- Lesser moved into the Rutherford with two parrots in 1999, and there were no complaints until March 2015, five months after she bought a third parrot, the Washington Post reports. The New York City Department of Environmental Protection visited the building 15 times in the year after the neighbor's complaint and found no violations.
- The co-op "never conducted any decibel testing or other objective evaluation of the alleged noise complaints," the Justice Department said in a news release. The Rutherford "never retained the services of a noise prevention consultant, architect, engineer, or anyone with qualifications or experience in soundproofing to address the neighbor's complaint."