backyard chickensSomehow or other, it is among the most draw of twenty-first hundred years metropolitan hipness to keep a couple of birds out back. We're mostly chatting hens. Exact quantities are unavailable, however the trend has become popular enough for dozens of major cities to revise their pet animal ordinances, thereby opening the legal floodgates for the introduction of urban pet agriculture, an endeavor that a lot of American locations legislated out of presence (primarily for health reasons) back in the nineteenth hundred years.This renaissance of foodie passion for the uber-local egg has also inspired its share of outlandish rhetoric. Says the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin: "Chickens are really bringing us jointly as a community." Says my Austin neighbor and co-owner of Boggy Creek Farm, Carol-Ann Sayle: "Everyone must have their own henhouse in their own yard."It's doubtful that the inbound mayor of New York City will agree with either of the sentiments. But no matter. Thousands of other urbanites nationwide--many of them so focused on keeping birds that they do so surreptitiously--are instantly giving a significant cluck about back garden eggs.Lost in all the enthusiasm are the drawbacks. Matching to Ian Elwood, of Canine Legal Defense Finance, "the alternatives backyard chicken farming looks for to create--food security, local foodsheds, healthy eating--are all better offered by encouraging more plant based mostly farming." His bottom line regarding urban agriculture is easy: "Let's leave pets or animals from it."What follows are five reasons why, when it comes to chickens, Elwood is onto something.1) Diminishing Development. Hens start laying eggs after about five calendar months. Production, 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 because they are to carefully turn her into poultry soup. The upshot is a sharp climb in abandoned parrots. In 2001, in line with the Associated Press, Minneapolis' Chicken Run Rescue fielded six phone calls from individuals seeking to find homes for forsaken chickens. By 2012, that quantity come to almost 500.2) Commercial Hatcheries. Bringing up hens in the garden seems like an obviously humane alternative to factory farming. In some ways, it is. However, upon this point, two strongly related facts should be considered. First, the majority of hens fortunate enough to escape the factory's electric battery cage hail from the same industrial hatcheries supplying manufacturing plant farms with an incredible number of parrots. This commonality not only undermines any pretense of convinced that backyard birds challenge the industrialized status quo, but it contributes to a second problem, namely the actual fact that the men chicks born in those professional hatcheries were likely either tossed alive into a grinder or gassed. Guy wild birds are worthless to a hatchery delivering egg farms. Home hens might be glorified, but their attractive rooster brothers are cured like trash.3) Predation. Backyard hens are specially susceptible to predation. Try out this test: when you learn that a friend gets backyard hens, check in 8 weeks later and have how things are going. It’s likely that good that the solution will go something like, "great, but . . . ." Pet dogs, pet cats, snakes, coyotes, possum, hawks, raccoons, raccoons, raccoons. These predators are common and persistent and your poor hens, the methods you have come to love as dogs, cannot enjoy their natural defense mechanisms (such as finding a minimal tree limb concealed in thick foliage). They often times find themselves captured in a few Ritz-Carleton of the coop that ended up being less secure than publicized and, in their plush safe havens, are killed in a way that makes the slaughterhouse seem such as a day spa in comparison. "What wiped out my birds?" It's an all too common question. And there are 23,900 answers being offered on Google.4) Roosters. There's about a 5 percent chance that your hen will grow to be a rooster. There are always a couple of known reasons for this mistake. For one, the sex of any chicken breast is hard to identify upon labor and birth, even for experts. Many roosters are unintentionally recognized as hens and delivered to give food to stores, where metropolitan farmer/hipsters flock to buy their stock. Less innocently, many male parrots are tossed into shipment containers as a form of packing material, deployed to prevent the hens from banging into the side of the kennel and having their retail value decreased. In any case, urban ordinances that do allow hens are markedly less accepting of roosters, who are generally considered chicken non-grata in urban settings.5) Cost. First-time backyard hen owners are enchanted by the idea of free eggs. Don't be fooled. Build the coop, choose the feed, pay the veterinarian, count the hours spent preserving the coop and administering treatment, compensate the neighbor's child for feeding the hens when you attend the Hamptons for the weekend, and then pick up a calculator. The results? As you backyard farmer from Merced, California told an online poultry community forum: "Don't notify my wife, but I believe my eggs are charging about $40 twelve."