The Benefits of Backyard Chickens

Somehow or other, it has become the tag of twenty-first century urban hipness to keep a couple of birds out back again. We're mostly speaking hens. Exact numbers are unavailable, but the trend has become popular enough for dozens of major metropolitan areas to revise their canine ordinances, thereby opening the legal floodgates for the emergence of urban creature agriculture, an effort that a lot of American locations legislated out of presence (generally for health reasons) back the nineteenth century.This renaissance of foodie affection for the uber-local egg has also inspired its talk about of outlandish rhetoric. Says the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin: "Chickens are actually bringing us mutually as a community." Says my Austin neighbor and co-owner of Boggy Creek Plantation, Carol-Ann Sayle: "Everyone should have their own henhouse in their own yard."It's doubtful that the inbound mayor of New York City will agree with either of these sentiments. But no subject. Thousands of other urbanites nationwide--many of these so focused on keeping hens that they certainly so surreptitiously--are abruptly giving a significant cluck about yard eggs.Lost in every the enthusiasm will be the drawbacks. Corresponding to Ian Elwood, of Pet Legal Defense Fund, "the solutions backyard chicken farming seeks to create--food security, local foodsheds, healthy eating--are all better offered by encouraging more plant centered farming." His bottom line regarding urban agriculture is simple: "Let's leave animals from it."Here are some are five reasons why, as it pertains to birds, Elwood is onto something.1) Diminishing Development. Hens start laying eggs after about five weeks. Development, however, wanes at age two. Hens can live for more than a decade. Many backyard hen owners are as reluctant to keep a non-productive hen as they are to carefully turn her into hen soup. The upshot has been a sharp climb in abandoned birds. In 2001, in line with the Associated Press, Minneapolis' Chicken Run Save fielded six telephone calls from individuals looking to find homes for forsaken hens. By 2012, that number come to almost 500.2) Commercial Hatcheries. Raising hens in the yard seems as an obviously humane alternative to factory farming. In some ways, it is. However, on this point, two directly related facts should be considered. First, the majority of hens fortunate enough to escape the factory's battery pack cage hail from the same professional hatcheries supplying manufacturing plant farms with millions of wild birds. This commonality not only undermines any pretense of convinced that backyard birds task the industrialized position quo, but it causes another problem, namely the fact that the guy chicks blessed in those commercial hatcheries were likely either tossed alive into a grinder or gassed. Guy birds are worthless to a hatchery offering egg farms. Household hens might be glorified, but their lovely fowl brothers are cured like trash.3) Predation. Yard hens are especially susceptible to predation. Try this experiment: when you learn a good friend gets backyard hens, check in two months later and ask how things 're going. Chances are good that the answer will go something similar to, "great, but . . . ." Puppies, felines, snakes, coyotes, possum, hawks, raccoons, raccoons, raccoons. These predators are prevalent and persistent and your poor hens, the ones you attended to love as dogs and cats, cannot enjoy their natural defense mechanisms (such as finding a low tree limb hidden in thick foliage). They often find themselves captured in some Ritz-Carleton of a coop that turned out to be less secure than advertised and, in their plush safe havens, are killed in a manner that makes the slaughterhouse seem to be such as a day spa in comparison. "What wiped out my chickens?" It's an all too common question. And there are currently 23,900 answers being offered on Google.4) Roosters. There's about a 5 percent chance that your hen will turn out to be a rooster. There are always a couple of reasons for this mistake. For just one, the sex of your rooster is hard to recognize upon birth, even for experts. Many roosters are accidentally discovered as hens and sent to feed stores, where metropolitan farmer/hipsters flock to buy their stock. Less innocently, many male birds are tossed into delivery containers as a form of packing material, deployed to avoid the hens from banging in to the aspect of the crate and having their retail value decreased. Regardless, urban ordinances that allow hens are markedly less accepting of roosters, who are generally considered chicken non-grata in metropolitan settings.5) Cost. First-time garden hen owners are enchanted by the idea of free eggs. Avoid being fooled. Build the coop, choose the feed, pay the veterinary, count the hours spent retaining the coop and administering good care, make up the neighbor's youngster for nourishing the hens when you go to the Hamptons for the weekend, and then pick up a calculator. The results? As one backyard farmer from Merced, California informed an online chicken community forum: "Don't notify my partner, but I believe my eggs are priced at about $40 twelve."