backyard chickensSomehow or other, it is just about the mark of twenty-first hundred years urban hipness to keep a bunch of birds out again. We're mostly talking hens. Exact numbers are unavailable, but the trend has become popular enough for dozens of major cities to revise their creature ordinances, thereby opening the legal floodgates for the introduction of urban creature agriculture, an endeavor that a lot of American cities legislated out of lifetime (primarily for health reasons) back the nineteenth hundred years.This renaissance of foodie passion for the uber-local egg in addition has inspired its show of outlandish rhetoric. Says the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin: "Chickens are actually bringing us alongside one another 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 incoming mayor of NEW YORK will agree with either of these sentiments. But no subject. A large number of other urbanites nationwide--many of these so focused on keeping hens that they do so surreptitiously--are out of the blue giving a significant cluck about garden eggs.Lost in every the enthusiasm will be the drawbacks. Relating to Ian Elwood, of Creature Legal Defense Account, "the alternatives backyard chicken farming looks for to create--food security, local foodsheds, healthy eating--are all better dished up by stimulating more plant founded farming." His bottom line regarding urban agriculture is simple: "Let's leave family pets from it."What follows are five reasons why, as it pertains to hens, Elwood is onto something.1) Diminishing Production. Hens start laying eggs after about five weeks. 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 poultry soup. The upshot has been a sharp go up in abandoned wild birds. In 2001, in line with the Associated Press, Minneapolis' Chicken breast Run Recovery fielded six calls from individuals seeking to find homes for forsaken birds. By 2012, that quantity reached almost 500.2) Commercial Hatcheries. Bringing up hens in the back garden seems like an obviously humane option to factory farming. In a few ways, it is. However, upon this point, two tightly related facts should be considered. First, nearly all hens luckily enough to flee the factory's battery pack cage hail from the same industrial hatcheries that supply stock farms with an incredible number of birds. This commonality not only undermines any pretense of thinking that backyard birds struggle the industrialized status quo, but it brings about another problem, namely the fact that the men chicks blessed in those industrial hatcheries were likely either tossed alive into a grinder or gassed. Guy wild birds are worthless to a hatchery delivering egg farms. Household hens might be glorified, but their lovely chicken breast brothers are cured like trash.3) Predation. Back garden hens are specially susceptible to predation. Try this test: when you learn a good friend gets backyard hens, check in 8 weeks later and ask how things are going. It’s likely that good that the response will go something similar to, "great, but . . . ." Pet dogs, cats, snakes, coyotes, possum, hawks, raccoons, raccoons, raccoons. These predators are common and persistent and your poor hens, the methods you attended to love as house animals, cannot enjoy their natural body's defence mechanism (such as finding a minimal tree limb concealed in dense foliage). They often find themselves stuck in some Ritz-Carleton of any 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 just 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 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 a couple of known reasons for this mistake. For just one, the sex of the chicken breast is hard to identify upon labor and birth, even for experts. Many roosters are inadvertently determined as hens and transported to supply stores, where urban farmer/hipsters flock to buy their stock. Less innocently, many male birds are tossed into shipping and delivery containers as a kind of packing material, deployed to avoid the hens from banging into the part of the crate and having their retail value lowered. In any case, urban ordinances that allow hens are markedly less accepting of roosters, who are generally considered chicken non-grata in urban settings.5) Cost. First-time yard hen owners are enchanted by the thought of free eggs. Don't be fooled. Build the coop, choose the supply, pay the vet, count the time spent preserving the coop and administering health care, compensate the neighbor's youngster 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 advised an online poultry community: "Don't tell my wife, but I believe my eggs are costing about $40 a dozen."