An Urban Chicken Saga

You absolutely must read Larissa Phillip’s charming story about raising chickens.

[Larissa] tells the story of her life-changing decision to buy a few chicks—which will inspire and guide any Free Pressers who are thinking of following in her footsteps. But first: a video, in which Larissa explains the basics of keeping chickens. —The Editors

Do watch the video if you’re entertaining the idea of chicken ownership. My wife prefers her chickens in the freezer.

An important caveat: In crowded quarters, the smell of chicken poop quickly becomes unpleasant. But proper space and ventilation solve this problem.

Chickens are part of many of Jared Diamond’s cultural packages. You can have a nice chicken dinner without killing off your livestock.

one of the best parts of chicken keeping: They don’t have to be trained.

Another plus: They will eat virtually anything. Yes, we would trek to a feed store in the Bronx, an hour’s drive from our house, to get them grain. (These days, Amazon sells everything you’d ever need for urban chickens.) But we also fed them our food scraps, from Chinese takeout to PB&J sandwiches to macaroni and cheese and other remnants from my kids’ lunchboxes. 

City folks are goofy about chickens

We had enough to share. Sometimes my kids would bring a half dozen into school as a gift for a teacher. We also liked sharing the chickens themselves. When we’d had them for about six months, we packed up two hens into a pet carrier and drove to our school’s annual fundraiser, the Harvest Fest, to set up a booth. Kids could hold a hen for a dollar. It was wildly popular.

City officials, not so much:

Every city has its own regulations. In New York City, the Office of Urban Agriculture allows hens within all five boroughs, but prohibits roosters. Too noisy. Considering how loud the city is, a bit of dawn crowing doesn’t seem like a big deal, but this ban is strictly enforced: A friend who kept chickens a few blocks from us hatched chicks, one of which turned out to be a rooster, and exactly one day after its first crow, there was a knock on her door. A representative from the health department informed her that she had a few days to get rid of it. It was that, or a hefty fine.

Mr Rooster, you’ve been designated Chicken Soup for the Soul. But definitely Soup. But raising chickens has a Dark Side:

The biggest problem with keeping chickens is that they’re addictive. They’re often jokingly referred to as the gateway farm animal, as “just a few chickens” turns into a desire for “just a few more.” In my case, I found keeping chickens so satisfying, and so delightful, that it became the gateway to a more drastic life decision: leaving the city, and moving to a farm upstate.

Of course, the folks whose ideas were so recently voted out of office had to sneer at people like Mrs Phillips.

With indications that the egg shortage is likely to continue and even worsen, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently offered a solution on Fox News: Americans might consider raising chickens in their backyards—a suggestion she was roundly mocked for, with the HuffPost describing it as “clucked-up.”

How dare you knuckle-dragging yahoos provide for their own sustenance (with eggs tastier than those available to the Cognoscenti)? Where do you think you are? America?