Petition for Backyard Chickens

Somehow or other, it has become the draw of twenty-first hundred years metropolitan hipness to keep a couple of birds out back. We're mostly chatting hens. Exact statistics are unavailable, but the trend has become popular enough for a large number of major towns to revise their pet animal ordinances, thereby opening the legal floodgates for the introduction of urban dog agriculture, an undertaking that most American towns legislated out of presence (generally for health reasons) back the nineteenth hundred years.This renaissance of foodie affection for the uber-local egg has also inspired its show of outlandish rhetoric. Says the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin: "Chickens are really bringing us mutually 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 back garden."It's doubtful that the incoming mayor of NEW YORK will agree with either of the sentiments. But no matter. A large number of other urbanites nationwide--many of these so committed to keeping chickens that they certainly so surreptitiously--are suddenly giving a major cluck about back garden eggs.Lost in every the enthusiasm are the drawbacks. Regarding to Ian Elwood, of Dog Legal Defense Fund, "the solutions backyard chicken farming looks for to create--food security, local foodsheds, healthy eating--are all better served by stimulating more plant centered farming." His important thing regarding urban agriculture is simple: "Let's leave animals out of it."Here are some are five explanations why, when it comes to chickens, Elwood is onto something.1) Diminishing Production. Hens start laying eggs after about five weeks. Production, 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 as they are to carefully turn her into hen soup. The upshot is a sharp go up in abandoned birds. In 2001, in line with the Associated Press, Minneapolis' Chicken breast Run Recovery fielded six calls from individuals looking to find homes for forsaken hens. By 2012, that amount reached almost 500.2) Commercial Hatcheries. Raising hens in the garden seems as an obviously humane alternative to factory farming. In some ways, it is. However, on this point, two tightly related facts is highly recommended. First, nearly all hens fortunate enough to flee the factory's power supply cage hail from the same professional hatcheries supplying manufacturer farms with millions of birds. This commonality not only undermines any pretense of convinced that backyard birds concern the industrialized status quo, but it contributes to another problem, namely the fact that the male chicks given birth to in those professional hatcheries were likely either tossed alive into a grinder or gassed. Men birds are worthless to a hatchery providing egg farms. Home hens might be glorified, but their lovely fowl brothers are cured like trash.3) Predation. Backyard hens are specially vulnerable to predation. Try out this experiment: when you learn a friend gets backyard hens, check in two months later and have how things are going. Chances are good that the solution will go something similar to, "great, but . . . ." Dogs, felines, snakes, coyotes, possum, hawks, raccoons, raccoons, raccoons. These predators are common and persistent as well as your poor hens, people you attended to love as dogs and cats, cannot enjoy their natural defense mechanisms (such as finding a low tree limb concealed in thick foliage). They often times find themselves trapped in some Ritz-Carleton of an 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 seem like a day spa by comparison. "What wiped out my hens?" 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 known reasons for this mistake. For one, the sex of your fowl is hard to recognize upon delivery, even for experts. Many roosters are accidentally recognized as hens and shipped to give food to stores, where urban farmer/hipsters flock to buy their stock. Less innocently, many male birds are tossed into shipping containers as a kind of packing materials, deployed to prevent the hens from banging into the aspect of the dog crate and having their retail value lowered. In any case, urban ordinances that do allow hens are markedly less accepting of roosters, who are more often than not considered chicken non-grata in urban settings.5) Cost. First-time garden hen owners are enchanted by the thought of free eggs. Avoid being fooled. Build the coop, choose the give food to, pay the vet, count the hours spent retaining the coop and administering care and attention, make up the neighbor's child for nourishing the hens when you attend the Hamptons for the weekend, and then get a calculator. The results? As you yard farmer from Merced, California told an online hen discussion board: "Don't notify my partner, but I think my eggs are costing about $40 a dozen."