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Reporting from Madison, Wis. -- Jen Lynch and her family live in the heart of the city but roll out of bed to the sound of clucking chickens.
Their day starts with cleaning coops, scooping out feed and hunting for eggs for morning omelets. Eight families in a three-block radius and an estimated 150 families citywide do the same.
When I lived in Oakland, I knew of a lot more people who had chickens in their backyards than I do here in my new digs in my small rural town.
It's totally do-able in either kind of place. If a person can have dogs in their yard, well, chickens (at least hens) are typically quieter and less stinky. Methinks the "clucking" neighbors referred to in the article doth protest too much without knowing what the heck they're talking about.
There's nothing better than looking out my window now and seeing my girls scratching around in the backyard looking for treats.
If more people, urban and rural, raised their own eggs, had their own gardens, we'd be a much healthier nation!
Then don't go to Austin. There's even a Backyard Chicken group, and an annual tour of the backyard coops. They've been inside the city limits for longer than most of the people inside the city limits have been on the planet, and they're perfectly legal. No roosters, though. There's also the occasional pony or horse or goat, depending on the neighborhood.
Just imagine how sterile and boring city life would be without these kinds of things.
Well, they don't even allow hog farming in some parts of the country (deed restrictions against it even if there's not a county ordinance against it).
But there's a difference, as presumably you know, between a couple of chickens and hogs. Though I do know people have had Vietnamese potbellied pigs as pets in the city in times past.
Let's see: parrots are noisy, dogs bark, cats kill birds . . . why should we allow anything that lives in our cities at all that isn't us? They all have negatives, after all. Heck, other people are annoying, too! What can we do about that problem?
Decades ago a Bantam hen came into our yard from somwhere. We never did find out who she belonged too.
Anyway the kids loved her...called her "Pepper" and she would come running when called by name.
She had the whole fenced in back yard and we left the small garage door open for her to roost in at night.
Eggs were small...no big deal.
I even took her for a ride more then once with her sitting behind my shoulder in the car. She never tried to get away...seemed almost happy with her environment that it was. Kids thought it was great.
We bought some chicken feed for her and she kept our back yard clean of bugs.
It's a trend. And like other trends, it will fade out in time.
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