At 5:20 a.m. yesterday, I turned on my computer. Within minutes, I was watching Terry Golson's chickens peck away in the backyard of her home outside Boston, Mass. – live.
I know what you're thinking. But I didn't tune in for long, I swear, and it was all in the name of good, honest research. I found out about Ms. Golson's hencam while digging into the latest cultural phenomenon sweeping North America: the urban chicken.
When Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson announced he was going to allow people to start raising chickens in their backyard, I thought he was joking. But when he dug up the lawn at city hall to plant a vegetable garden, I realized he wasn't.
Soon, I was imagining the mayor in overalls, pitchfork in hand, standing outside the doors of city hall channelling Eddie Albert on Green Acres .
Vancouver is the place to be,
Farm living is the life for me.
Land spreading out so far and wide,
Keep Toronto, just give me my countryside.
Little did I know that the mayor was simply opening up the backyards of his city to the latest trend in urban agriculture: cruelty-free eggs.
Vancouver is not the first city in B.C. to allow hens inside city limits. Victoria did it years ago. Since then, the suburbs of Richmond and Burnaby have also said it's fine, with restrictions. There are other cities across the country that have said okay to the chicken as well.
But Vancouver is the first major metropolis in Canada to okay it, and because of that, it has generated wider attention. The city's move, as I say, comes at a time when urban poultry farming is all the rage. It's the subject of a lengthy essay in the recent issue of the New Yorker. The piece examines the bird's fascinating history in America. It points to the burgeoning number of websites devoted to the subject, not to mention magazines such as Backyard Poultry.
There are fascinating accounts of inexplicable devotion. Take the woman who lost one of her chickens in a snow storm. She later found it frozen, presumably dead. She did what any self-respecting chicken owner would do: thawed the bird and performed CPR. It apparently came back to life.
Most jurisdictions that have allowed the backyard chicken have said no to roosters. Now I thought chickens needed a rooster to produce eggs – apparently not. But roosters are too noisy for an urban setting. Vancouver has said no to the rooster and also restricted the number of hens residents can have to four. How they're planning to patrol that I have no idea.
I've discovered a couple of things in my research: First, chickens are fairly benign, quiet creatures. Give them a little food and they'll give you some nice, fresh eggs most days. If you are a responsible owner, chickens can be raised in a major urban setting without a problem.
It's those who aren't responsible who create issues. Raccoons and other predators love a chicken coop not properly sealed. So do rats. If you don't properly clean the chicken coop, it can begin to smell – quite badly. There's also that avian flu thing. And chickens can attract parasites with names like nematode, enteritis and coccidiosis.
I also wonder how the lawyer-by-day/chicken-owner-by-night is going to handle certain situations. Like when an egg gets stuck coming out. It happens, not infrequently. And when it does, you have to stick your hand in there and get it.
It's also not uncommon for a hen's vents to collapse. A vent is the external opening at the bottom of the bird's vaginal canal. To fix the problem, you're supposed to moisten your fingers (hemorrhoid cream is the lubricant of choice) and move the vent back into place. I can see hockey dads and soccer moms throughout the city just dying to snap on the rubber gloves to perform that little procedure.
More realistically, I imagine the offices of veterinarians being overrun with city folk having chicken problems. Urban dwellers and their children are going to become attached to these creatures. When the little birds are feeling under the weather, Vancouverites will spend thousands to get the problem diagnosed.
Still, if people want to raise chickens in their backyard, I say go for it. If it takes off, Mayor Robertson may want to rename his city Hooterville.
