backyard chickensSomehow or other, it is among the most draw of twenty-first hundred years urban hipness to keep a couple of birds out back. We're mostly speaking hens. Exact statistics are unavailable, but the trend is becoming popular enough for dozens of major cities to revise their creature ordinances, thereby beginning the legal floodgates for the introduction of urban dog agriculture, an effort that a lot of American cities legislated out of presence (principally for health reasons) back in the nineteenth century.This renaissance of foodie devotion for the uber-local egg in addition has inspired its talk about of outlandish rhetoric. Says the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin: "Chickens are really bringing us along as a community." Says my Austin neighbor and co-owner of Boggy Creek Plantation, Carol-Ann Sayle: "Everyone must have their own henhouse in their own backyard."It's doubtful that the incoming mayor of NEW YORK will agree with either of the sentiments. But no subject. A large number of other urbanites nationwide--many of these so focused on keeping birds that they certainly so surreptitiously--are all of a sudden giving a major cluck about backyard eggs.Lost in all the enthusiasm will be the drawbacks. Regarding to Ian Elwood, of Canine Legal Defense Account, "the solutions backyard chicken farming seeks to create--food security, local foodsheds, healthy eating--are all better offered by pushing more plant structured farming." His important thing regarding urban agriculture is easy: "Let's leave pets or animals out of it."What follows are five reasons why, when it comes to hens, Elwood is onto something.1) Diminishing Production. Hens start laying eggs after about five months. Development, however, wanes at the age of two. Hens can live for well over a decade. Many backyard hen owners are as unwilling to keep a non-productive hen because they are to turn her into chicken breast soup. The upshot has been a sharp rise in abandoned birds. In 2001, based on the Associated Press, Minneapolis' Fowl Run Rescue fielded six telephone calls from individuals looking to find homes for forsaken birds. By 2012, that quantity come to almost 500.2) Commercial Hatcheries. Bringing up hens in the back garden seems like an obviously humane option to factory farming. In some ways, it is. However, upon this point, two strongly related facts is highly recommended. First, nearly all hens fortunate enough to flee the factory's battery pack cage hail from the same industrial hatcheries that supply factory farms with millions of birds. This commonality not only undermines any pretense of convinced that backyard birds task the industrialized status quo, but it contributes to another problem, namely the fact that the guy chicks delivered in those commercial hatcheries were likely either tossed alive into a grinder or gassed. Male wild birds are worthless to a hatchery delivering egg farms. Household hens might be glorified, but their cute rooster brothers are cured like trash.3) Predation. Garden hens are specially susceptible to predation. Try out this experiment: when you learn that a friend gets backyard hens, check in two months later and ask how things 're going. It’s likely that good that the solution will go something similar to, "great, but . . . ." Dogs, cats, snakes, coyotes, possum, hawks, raccoons, raccoons, raccoons. These predators are widespread and persistent and your poor hens, the ones you have come to love as dogs, cannot engage their natural defense mechanisms (such as finding a minimal tree limb covered in dense foliage). They often times find themselves captured in some Ritz-Carleton of your coop that turned out to be less secure than advertised and, in their plush safe havens, are wiped out in a way that makes the slaughterhouse appear like a day spa in comparison. "What wiped out my chickens?" It's an all too common question. And there are currently 23,900 answers on offer on Google.4) Roosters. There's in regards to a 5 percent chance that your hen will grow to be a rooster. There are always a couple of reasons for this mistake. For one, the sex of an poultry is hard to identify upon labor and birth, even for experts. Many roosters are unintentionally recognized as hens and shipped to give food to stores, the place where urban farmer/hipsters flock to buy their stock. Less innocently, many male parrots are tossed into delivery containers as a form of packing materials, deployed to prevent the hens from banging into the aspect of the kennel and having their retail value decreased. In any case, urban ordinances that allow hens are markedly less accepting of roosters, who are generally considered poultry non-grata in metropolitan settings.5) Cost. First-time back garden hen owners are enchanted by the thought of free eggs. Don't be fooled. Build the coop, buy the feed, pay the veterinary, count the time spent keeping the coop and administering good care, compensate the neighbor's child for feeding 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 advised an online fowl discussion board: "Don't notify my partner, but I think my eggs are costing about $40 a dozen."