Backyard chickens: friends or food?
For many suburbanites with backyard coops, their chickens are not only a source of fresh eggs. They are fun for the kids, friendly and funny. Useful too. They eat ticks and other insect pests, provide excellent fertilizer for the garden, and make short work of any kitchen scraps you throw their way. Ask a chicken person what their biggest regret is, and more often than not, you’ll hear it’s that they wish they had a bigger coop so they could get more birds.
Take Kirsten Bowser. Her eight-week-old birds are about to move from a temporary home in her garage to a brand new chicken coop on her Hudson property.
She chose Ameraucana hens for their bluish eggs, but she’s already dreaming of adding other varieties to her flock so she can have eggs in a rainbow of colours.
“Once you’ve had a few chickens, you want more, and you want different breeds,” she said. “People who start off with three end up with 40. Like they move to another place because they just want more chickens.”
Bowser is the latest of my friends to jump on the backyard chicken bandwagon. I contemplated it myself when I lived in a municipality where it was allowed. Sadly, my chicken dreams were dashed when I moved to St-Lazare. Despite its semi-rural location dotted with small horse farms, bylaws currently allow chickens only in agricultural zones.
Two years ago, VaudreuilDorion amended its bylaws to allow homeowners to install backyard chicken coops.
A recent controversy over someone else’s illicit coop is now bringing the chicken question top of mind in St-Lazare, and the topic has been coming up in other West Island and Off-Island municipalities as well. One thing ’s for sure: it brings up a lot of strong feelings on both sides.
Opponents of chickens raise concerns ranging from whether they attract dangerous predators and vermin to whether chicken owners will take proper care of them, but these are risks that can be addressed with education and regulation.
I suspect the biggest hesitation about allowing chickens in residential areas comes down to the uncomfortable fact that chickens are sort of like pets, except that one day you might eat them.
Even the best layers slow down egg production after only a few years, and a coop has only so much room. At a certain point, a chicken owner has to decide: is this bird friend or food?
Some chicken-lovers keep non-productive hens or re-home their birds to larger farms. Many others steel themselves to send their chickens to “freezer camp” or a pot on the stove when their egg-laying days are done.
While this moment of truth might catch some naive chickenowners off-guard, I suspect it’s actually a part of the appeal for many who keep chickens. It’s not that they want to kill their feathered friends. It’s that they want to be ethically consistent.
It’s something Bowser said she’s thought about. If Bowser’s young birds were meat chickens from a commercial farm, they would have already gone to the slaughterhouse.
Her family is not vegetarian. They don’t want to be the kind of people who feel no qualms about eating chicken breasts from the grocery store and yet are too squeamish to eat a chicken that once had a name.
Is it really morally worse to kill a beloved animal for food that was raised with care from the time it hatched than to buy those tidy packages of plastic-wrapped pink meat from birds raised in crowded factory farms?
Food for thought.