A donkey tale ends with a swift kick

“It was not a hee haw - it was more like a screech,’’ said Russell Stanton, a software programmer, as he stood in the backyard of his ranch home staring into his neighbor’s yard - where two miniature donkeys, a mother and her 2-month-old foal, are corralled.

The donkey sounds roused him, even with his Harvey replacement windows shut tight, he said. And so he protested - along with other neighbors. One neighbor called the police anonymously to report the braying. Others wrote letters to the town complaining of the donkeys’ odor and expressing concern that the animals would lower property values. At a zoning board of appeals hearing on the matter, the board chair had to caution objectors to quiet down, lest they upset the donkeys’ caretaker, a 12-year-old girl whose parents had moved from Cambridge to Andover in search of a more pastoral existence.

At a time when community gardens are oversubscribed and local agriculture has become a moral cause, the boundaries of farming in suburbia are being pushed and redrawn. Across Greater Boston, backyards are newly home to chickens, goats, alpacas, and other farm animals. But one person’s efforts to get back to the land can be another’s manure-scented nightmare, and, at least in Andover, the stuff of neighborhood rifts and painstaking bylaw-parsing.

The story of the donkey divide began in 2004, when Leyla Schimmel and her husband bought a neo-Colonial house on a dead-end street abutting conservation land. Not far from her husband’s job in Cambridge, the property was roomy enough for the farming that she wanted to incorporate into the curriculum of her five home-schooled children. They cleared brush from the backyard and she planted an organic garden.

She acquired 14 chickens, half miniatures and half egg-laying. Last April, when her daughter wanted to embark on a 4H project, she and her husband bought a pregnant miniature donkey from a breeder in New Jersey. They chose a miniature donkey over, say, a goat, because donkeys tend to be quieter, cleaner, and repel neighborhood pests, like coyotes and foxes. On average, they grow to about 200 to 300 pounds and 3 feet tall at the top of the back. On June 1, at 7 a.m., the donkey, Chloe, gave birth to her foal, Zoe.

Schimmel, a trained biologist, said the two donkeys embraced their new home. The neighbor’s cat and the chickens took to riding on the mother donkey’s back and the baby donkey enjoys chasing the chickens.

Occasionally, when Schimmel’s daughter was late to feed the donkeys, they brayed, Schimmel said. Odor was not a problem because she composted their waste, she said.

“It’s hard to understand how neighbors could find anything to complain about,’’ Schimmel said, as she stood in her backyard and watched her children scoop up chickens and nuzzle them.

But complaints poured in to police and town officials. A smelly, braying donkey, critics said, violated the suburban compact: a zoning bylaw that prohibits “horses, ponies, or other large domestic animals’’ on property that is less than 2 acres. Schimmel’s lot is less than 2 acres.

Schimmel sought a variance to the zoning bylaw, arguing that the bylaw does not specifically bar donkeys on her lot. But after the raucous meeting this month, board officials unanimously agreed with neighbors.

“Our empathy was with the young girl and her 4H project,’’ Stephen Anderson, chairman of the Zoning Board of Appeals, said in a telephone interview. “On the other hand, the bylaws are very clear.’’

In the Andover neighborhood of tended lawns and attached garages, donkey sympathizers were hard to find on a recent afternoon.

“I wouldn’t go into Chelsea and build a zoo,’’ said one neighbor, who asked that he not be identified because he worried about causing more tension in the neighborhood. “If I wanted a donkey, I’d buy a place where it belongs.’’

His wife added, “It would be hard to sell a house with a donkey next door.’’

She also said she worried about the welfare of the donkeys.

“They donkeys don’t have enough room to move. They should have pasture land.’’

The only donkey supporters, it would seem, are the donkeys’ closest neighbors.

“What’s important? Zoning laws? No. You want good people,’’ said Sandra Ober. “These people are real. They are the way life should be.’’

Ober said she has never smelled the donkeys, or heard them. Every day, she said, she stands on her porch and watches the foal trot around her pen, kicking its legs out and chasing chickens.

“We will miss the donkeys,’’ she said.

Chloe and Zoe are expected to leave soon. A local farm has agreed to board them.

Nancy Jeton, a member of the Zoning Board of Appeals, said the donkey experiment has a place in Andover - but in the portion of town where lots are more than 2 acres.

“What she has in her backyard is unbelievably cool. But she needs to find a different location,’’ Jeton said.

Schimmel, on that point, agrees.

“We did pick the wrong neighborhood,’’ she said.