That said, my wife and I live in Pittsburgh with a couple of cats, 5 chickens, and a garden we love to work in. 

Tear the window security bars out if they don't have a fire release, throw some cheap co/smoke detectors up, double strap the water heater and no duct tape isn't going to cut it (CA earthquake thing), cut the 3 foot weeds back away from touching the exterior wall, get rid of that goddamn chicken seriously a "pet" chicken is not part of a vacant duplex wtf (true story), you know... that sort of thing.

I was a big chicken :)Jason Yahner I got it to work!  

Instead the tenants free ranged chickens, and fenced the dog in small area of the yard that received the least sunlight. 

This means if you give notice on the March 28th, or even March 5th, they will have till the end of April to vacate the property before they are unlawfully staying as an holdover.This is simply because the lease ("contract") has terminated, thus they are without a contract, so the laws of the land ("Land Lord Tenant Act") are now in affect.In the event of a court case, the judge may enforce some of the speciality items in the lease (lawn care, legal fees, no modifying the property, HOA rules, etc), but everything else will fall under the month-to-month laws.This all said, tenants normally read the lease at face value vs knowing the law, so if they see the 60 day notice, or the lease says they have to sacrifice two chickens and a goat to terminate the lease, they will likely just do whatever the lease says, thus why the courts treat business as educated and give some lead-way to tenants in most cases.I'm not an attorney, and my posts are for entertainment only.

the lesson I learned is "don't count your chickens before they hatch"

But if you're thinking about buying stock in a big food processing company tomorrow, wouldn't it be good for you to know if their supply chain management team works effectively to ensure that the chickens delivered to their facilities are disease-free, or if that part of the company is so incompetent that a salmonella outbreak and massive chicken recall at some point in the near future is unavoidable?

I'M CHICKEN - - deck it over to remove all liability.

On one hand, most of my accomplishments have been self-motivated and through "trial-by-fire", and I'm ok with taking my bumps and creating my business as a one man show, for now (although I'm hardly a spring chicken).  

We have 2 dogs and 7 chickens.