THE COMEBACK OF THE CHICKEN

Chickens have been domesticated for thousands of years all over our planet. At one time, just about every farm and many city residences had chickens. Then, starting in the 1950s, small towns and cities wanted to have a more progressive image so they banned all livestock and mistakenly lumped chickens in with pigs, cattle, horses, and sheep.  As happens so many times, the pendulum of history swings back the other way and now more and more cities allow chickens once again.  Folks realized the valuable resource that they lost and asked their city government to once again have chickens with reasonable restrictions. Today, over 65% of large cities once again allow residents to have chickens.

The codes for once again allowing residents to have the amazing chicken are usually simple and straight forward; most go something like the following:

• no more than six hens
• no roosters
• chickens must be kept in an enclosure and not allowed to be loose
• minimum distance from lot line or closest dwelling

So why are so many cities and towns once again allowing the beautiful chicken?  Well, a lot of reasons.

• Homegrown eggs are tastier and healthier for you than store bought eggs.
• To reach your plate, the average food on your table has traveled 1,300 miles to get there. With your own chickens, it is a matter of feet to your, fun to watch, living food factories.
• You can feed all of your food waste to your chickens, all except chicken. Of the average household’s waste, 15% is comprised of food waste, so that is quite  a bit of chicken feed, which would otherwise be thrown away unless it is composted.
• Chickens are easy to care for.  Of course, always providing fresh water, some cracked corn, called scratch, adding laying mass, and ground up oyster shell when they are 20 to 25 weeks old, which is when they start to produce eggs.  Of course, they need a simple, secure shelter where the hens can lay their eggs and roost at night and get out of the weather.

So, if you would like to once again be allowed to legally have chickens with reasonable restrictions, go to your local government officials and ask them to change the code so that chickens can once again be legal in your town and your yard.  Of course, you need to be well informed, so here are some websites that provide tons of information.

The first is thecitychicken.com, a really fun website to look at lots of pictures and information. Two other websites that would be good to look at are backyardchickens.com and urbanchicken.org.