…I would get a chicken or two! The DC City Council is considering relaxing the restrictions on urban chickens. According to the Washington Examiner:
Ward 6 D.C. Councilman Tommy Wells is proposing to erase rules that prohibit fowl within 50 feet of any building “used for human habitation,” a regulation that denies most District residents the opportunity to harbor hens.
Urban chickens are increasingly popular nationally in the down economy, as families look to produce their own eggs and cities pass laws to ease the process. The D.C. measure was drafted on behalf of a Capitol Hill family, Wells’ constituents, whose eight hens were recently confiscated by animal control officers.
The new rule would allow backyard chickens as long as there was significant buy-off from the neighbors. I think it’s a fair solution.
Would you get chickens if you had the space (and it was legal)?
Here in Olympia, you can have chickens, pot bellied pigs, cats, and dogs, but a total of only three. Since we already have a dog and a cat, we could have only one chicken. I’m pretty sure that chickens like to have at least one chicken-friend. So, I’ll have to keep thinking about it.
I think that you need a rooster as well, I have never seen hens and no rooster. There is a reason why…
I would have chickens, ducks and a few turkeys.
No rooster is needed to get eggs. Of course you need a rooster if you want the eggs to be fertile, to hatch out a next generation. I think the backyard chicken movement is awesome, right along with the kitchen gardening trend. People do need to keep in mind, though, that hens keep living long past laying age, and they need to have a plan for what to do then. Keep the old hens as pets, and keep adding more young ones for eggs? Or butcher the old ones for soup? And if you do hatch out chicks from eggs, what to do with extra roosters? Let them fight constantly, or fry some? That’s what the old-fashioned homesteader would do, and some modern city farmers would be fine with it too — but they just need to think it through before they start.