2009 Urban Chickens Year in Review

By most accounts, 2009 is the year urban chickens, the phenomenon, the trend, the craze, hit the mainstream.

During the first half of the year, news outlets across the country were reporting every other day on this "new craze" for keeping chickens in your backyard. Just on this blog, I've shared links to stories on ABC, NPR, CBC Radio, CBC Television, Marketplace, CNN and NBC's Today Show so we're not talking personal testimonies in small-town dailies here.

The year 2009 also saw the long-awaited release of the Mad City Chickens movie, followed by producers Tashai and Robert's cross-country screenings tour, lending more weight to local efforts to legalize chickens in back yards. If nothing else, Mad City Chickens galvanized the movement, providing a readily-accessible, highly educational and imminently entertaining re-introduction to why we keep chickens in our backyards (and why others should, too).

All the media exposure may have contributed to the shortage of chicks during the Spring, with people having to wait months to get their peepers. Large hatcheries took advantage of the seller's market and prices for immediate-delivery chicks rose accordingly. Feed and fuel stores that took six weeks to sell 800 chicks in years past sold out within ten days this year. (I expect a repeat in 2010, but my predictions post will appear here Friday). This demand could also explain why this year's most popular blog post was "where to buy baby chicks."

While national pres coverage piqued interest in keeping chickens, local frustrations flared with people trying to find out whether they could keep urban chickens and, if not, then trying to get chickens legalized within city limits. It seems the keeping of chickens is a strong indicator of a small city's evolution from rural to urban status, and in the surge 40-50 years ago to urbanize, many anti-chicken ordinances were put on the books.

Looking across the landscape, the urban chicken laws are inconsistent when they're on the books, and open to interpretation depending on with whom you speak at city hall when you call to inquire. To try and address the issue of where are chickens legal, I've recently launched the Urban Chickens Network Legal Resource Center, and you'll see more about that in early 2010.

2009 saw lots of success in getting chickens legalized across the country. The folks in Asheville, NC, did a masterful job of using social media to successfully pass a new ordinance allowing urban chickens. Among the places we saw celebrations happen: Huntington (NY), Gulfport (FL), Vancouver (BC), New Haven (CT), Longmont (CO) and Provo (UT).

The fight to legalize urban chickens remains an uphill battle in many places, but we're getting better at busting the myths about bad things in keeping chickens (too much poop, spreading bird flu, enforcement costs, hosting salmonella). And we're getting smarter at knowing how to change the laws.

And thanks to success stories like that in Fort Collins (CO), where they celebrated a year of legal urban chickens in 2009, we can see that many of the fears expressed by those seeking to keep the status quo are as unfounded and absurd as any rational person would believe on first hearing them.

It's been a wonderful year, all around. I'm amazed we had over 92,000 unique visitors come to read something here on the blog this year, and almost 2,500 people fanned our Urban Chickens Facebook page, to boot. I'm grateful for all those who left a comment, sent an email or shared a link. I find it tremendously rewarding you've chosen to give me your attention and I hope to earn the chance for more of it in 2010. I'm also grateful to our blog sponsor this past Spring, MyPetChicken.com for helping us afford some extra chicken scratch around the house.

A review of 2009 wouldn't be complete without noting events in our Redwood City backyard. We had a bittersweet year with our own urban chickens, Sophia and ZsuZsu. After years of companionship, egg production and entertainment, our lovely Sophia died suddenly in August. After much hand-wringing, research and outreach, we found a new flock in Los Altos for our remaining chicken, ZsuZsu, to join so as not to have her all alone in our now-empty coop.

So, we end 2009 "in-between chickens" with plans to get new birds early in 2010. I can't wait to share with you our experience of raising even more chickens in our backyard, and to help bring this experience to more and more backyards across the country (and Canada, too!).

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope 2010 is your best yet!

More Urban Chickens on the Radio

I'm a little late to publish this, but only recently have I been able to listen to the fascinating Think Out Loud show all about urban chickens over on Oregon Public Broadcasting. The show doesn't examine the "how" of keeping chickens in the city as much as the "why."

The show's guests include:

• John Carr: Backyard chicken keeper and designer of The Garden Coop
• Barbara Palermo: Animal health technician and founder of Chickens in the Yard
• John Kilian: Dentist who spoke out against backyard chickens in Gresham
• Ken Stine: Gresham planning commissioner 

As you're listening to the show (I recommend downloading the mp3 instead of trying to listen from the web page, as the datastream drops often), take a look at the comments left on the show's web page. Once you get past the first comment re: El Caminos, there's a string of rather endearing stories about why people are keeping chickens in their own backyards.

Enjoy!

Fort Collins Urban Chickens Law: what went wrong?

(Spoiler alert: absolutely nothing!) In early 2008, there were quite a few ruffled feathers and loud squawks of despair around the thought of legalizing urban chickens in Fort Collins, Colorado. The arguments against keeping chickens were the usual "we don't want no dirty, smelly, loud, disease-infested, rodent-attracting critters around here" kind.

However, thanks to the perseverance of Dan Brown of the Fort Collins Urban Hens, the measure (a strict one, at that) was passed in September 2008, allowing six hens per household.

This week, the Coloradoan has a great follow-up story on all that's happened in Fort Collins since chickens were made legal, and as we urban chickens fans would expect, everything's gone just fine, thankyouverymuch.

In fact, a total of 36 households have acquired chicken licenses (and one could assume, chickens, too), yet none of the bad things the opposition had foretold has come to pass.

Director of animal control with the Larimer Humane Society, Bill Porter, says that of the 14,314 calls to animal control since the chicken law went on the books, "There were four calls of complaints from roosters crowing." The four roosters in town that peeved off neighbors were "accidents," Porter reports: owners thought they were buying hens as chicks only to discover they were roosters. "The other two regarded smell and location of the coop, and both cases were unfounded." (emphasis mine)

Longtime readers know that one of the arguments AGAINST urban chickens that's consistently trotted out time and again is the myth of "it'll cost too much to enforce the new rule." Even though the calls to animal control in Fort Collins were bogus, they still took time to investigate. But these calls were less than one-tenth of one percent of the volume of complaints to deal with (0.04% to be exact). A rounding error, at best.

It's satisfying to see real evidence that enforcement costs come nowhere near what the anti-chicken crew would have you believe. Yet another case of proving the anti-chicken hysteria wrong.

Reminds me a lot of the follow-up story Missoula Urban Chickens Law: what went wrong?

urban chickens: solving the spread of bird flu

This is the fourth post in a series exploring some of the more common concerns I see raised in the debate to allow urban chickens. (see previous installments: salmonella fears, what to do with the poop and the cost to enforce urban chicken laws)

Today's topic is the argument I see thrown earliest and most carelessly by any naive naysayer in the discussion of legalizing urban chickens: "brilliant idea! Chickens in the yard next door. Hasn't anyone heard of bird flu?!?"

the best response to this is to take a few minutes (four, to be exact) to watch the embedded movie below to make you more educated about bird flu than 98% of the population. I'll see you once you scroll below the flick:



So, as the movie says, and as the research, some of which I share below, shows: our backyard flocks are actually part of the solution, not part of the problem of spreading bird flu throughout the world.

The Origins of Bird Flu

Dr. Michael Greger has written a wonderful book, Bird Flu -- A Virus of Our Own Hatching, that delivers a meticulously detailed, yet highly readable, examination of bird flu and what it means to us. (Those of you who've seen Mad City Chickens will recognize him from the vignette covering bird flu in the movie).

Here's his brief recap of how the flu came about and why it's coming out of Asia:

Experts think human influenza started about 4,500 years ago with the domestication of waterfowl like ducks, the original source of all influenza viruses. According to the University of Hong Kong’s Kennedy Shortridge, this “brought influenza viruses into the ‘farmyard,’ leading to the emergence of epidemics and pandemics.” Before 2500 B.C.E., likely nobody ever got the flu.

Duck farming dramatically spread and intensified over the last 500 years, beginning during the Ching Dynasty in China in 1644 A.D. Farmers moved ducks from the rivers and tributaries onto flooded rice fields to be used as an adjunct to rice farming. This led to a permanent year-round gene pool of avian influenza viruses in East Asia in close proximity to humans. The domestic duck of southern China is now considered the principal host of all influenza viruses with pandemic potential.

This is probably why the last two pandemics started in China. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), China is the largest producer of chicken, duck, and goose meat for human consumption. It accounts for 70% of the world’s tonnage of duck meat and more than 90% of global goose meat. China has more than two dozen species of waterfowl. As Osterholm has said, “China represents the most incredible reassortment laboratory for influenza viruses that anyone could ever imagine.”

Extensive sampling of Asian waterfowl in the years following the Hong Kong outbreak seems to have tracked H5N1 to a farmed goose outbreak in 1996, the year the number of waterfowl raised in China exceeded 2 billion birds. The virus seemed to have been playing a game of Duck, Duck, Goose…then Chicken.

If you take a look at any of the World Health Organization (WHO) maps showing the spread of H5N1 avian influenza, you'll notice right away the Western Hemisphere is missing from the map. Why? Because the H5N1 virus has never been found in North or South America.

Since 2003, H5N1 has infected at least 411 people in 15 countries and killed 254. It has killed or forced the culling of more than 300 million birds in 61 countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe. When you look at the Google News bird flu stories, you'll see where they're not coming from: North and South America.

Factory Farming and the Fragile Flock

In order for the flu virus to mutate, it has to have plenty of infected host bodies to use to evolve from one strain to the next as it find the best way to exploit the host body.

Factory farms, where hundreds of thousands of birds are kept in close proximity in their battery cages, are the perfect breeding ground for viruses to mutate and spread. The economics are simple: if we want cheap eggs and cheap chicken meat, the conditions must be crowded which lead to stressed birds and suppressed immune systems which further enable the virus to mutate and jump.

And it's just these kind of conditions that make it easy (and necessary) for the culling of millions of birds in a short period of time to prevent an influenza from spreading from just a few infected birds to millions. Great fodder for headlines.

When you look at our backyard flocks of six, twelve or even twenty chickens, there simply isn't a sufficient pool of bodies for the flu virus to mutate enough to make the leap from affecting the intestines of the fowl to infecting the lungs of a mammal (or human).

Moreover, the fact we're keeping our chickens in free-ranging (or close to it) environments means the flu virus is likely exposed to sunlight which quickly kills the virus and prevents it from spreading. Compare the sunlight exposure of even the most crowded narrow backyard to the cavernous dank and dark conditions inside a factory farm chicken house, and you can easily see which environment is more likely to contribute to the flu's spreading.

Dr. Gerger continues:

All bird flu viruses seem to start out harmless to both birds and people. In its natural state, the influenza virus has existed for millions of years as an innocuous, intestinal, waterborne infection of aquatic birds such as ducks. If the true home of influenza viruses is the gut of wild waterfowl, the human lung is a long way from home. How does a waterfowl’s intestinal bug end up in a human cough? Free-ranging flocks and wild birds have been blamed for the recent emergence of H5N1, but people have kept chickens in their backyards for thousands of years, and birds have been migrating for millions.

In a sense, pandemics aren’t born—they’re made. H5N1 may be a virus of our own hatching coming home to roost. According to a spokesperson for the World Health Organization, “The bottom line is that humans have to think about how they treat their animals, how they farm them, and how they market them—basically the whole relationship between the animal kingdom and the human kingdom is coming under stress.” Along with human culpability, though, comes hope. If changes in human behavior can cause new plagues, changes in human behavior may prevent them in the future.

The Mythology of Urban Chickens and Avian Flu

Everyone remembers that lone cow that kicked over the lantern in the O'Leary's barn to start the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 which killed hundreds and destroyed four square miles of buildings. Well, it turns out the cow causing the fire was a myth, created by Michael Ahern, a Chicago Republican reporter, to sell the story of the fire better.

It seems urban chickens are getting the same fanciful treatment when it comes to fear-mongering about bird flu, specifically the H5N1 virus which is regarded as poised to become the next pandemic.

What people don't seem to realize is that our urban chickens are the solution to stopping H5N1, not the problem!

I close with this last quote from Dr. Gerger's book:

To reduce the emergence of viruses like H5N1, humanity must shift toward raising poultry in smaller flocks, under less stressful, less crowded, and more hygienic conditions, with outdoor access, no use of human antivirals, and with an end to the practice of breeding for growth or unnatural egg production at the expense of immunity. This would also be expected to reduce rates of increasingly antibiotic-resistant pathogens such as Salmonella, the number-one food-borne killer in the United States. We need to move away from the industry’s fire-fighting approach to infectious disease to a more proactive preventive health approach that makes birds less susceptible—even resilient—to disease in the first place.

Sounds like a ringing endorsement of urban chickens to me. Why some cities still refuse to legalize them seems all the more insane to me now.

The evolution of anti-chicken ordinances in Mankato

Dan Linehan has written in the Mankato Free Press a fascinating account of the evolution of ordinances regulating animals in the city of Mankato, Minnesota.

Of all the news stories I've read about the issue of chickens in the city, Linehan's goes the deepest into exactly how the anti-chicken laws got on the books in the first place.

As you can imagine, things were mighty different back in the early 1900s anywhere outside of a major metropolis. There was much more of a live-and-let-live attitude to keeping all manner of "barnyard animals" in the backyard: people really were growing their own food.

Linehan relates:

Before Mankatoans developed urban sensibilities, they co-existed with horses, cows, poultry and even hogs — sometimes to hilarious effect. After a proposal to legalize chickens in the city was set aside recently by the City Council, people on both sides of the issue gave accounts of a time when people shared Mankato with their animals.

Take the account of Mr. C. A. Chapman, a founding member of the Blue Earth County Historical Society. The account, provided by the historical society, describes a contest in about 1919 to decide whether hogs would be able to run free through the city.

“Some of the more easygoing residents thought this was all right” while others said pigs “were not dignified animals to have running about a budding city,” Chapman wrote.

It was decided that the will of the people would settle the matter, though not in typical fashion.

A rope was stretched across Front Street and the opponents took opposite ends.

“Then the fun began.”

Chapman lived in South Bend and could not “vote,” but he watched and laughed as those “opposing the hog’s liberty” finally won the tug of war.

“This shows you how primitive we were in those days.”

“The animals aren’t going to be a problem until you had enough people who thought of themselves as urbanites,” said Bill Lass, a retired Minnesota State University history professor.

Sure, the swine vote makes for a good story, but I wonder how many other laws got on the books through methods like this?

(Linehan's article really warrants a full reading so please go and read it. Don't worry, I'll be here when you get back.)

Maybe if they held a tug-of-war over the urban chicken issue today in Mankato, those in favor of chickens just might win? Heck, maybe the City Councile should try a little mental tug-of-war and actually discuss the issue in an urban hearing.

The Free Press also runs a nicely worded, logical letter to the editor urging a public hearing by someone more local than I, concluding "It seems that the democratic thing to do would be to allow a hearing of the issue and see how much sentiment for or against the issue there really is, and then go forward from there."

Hear, hear.