Other cities have hatched backyard hen solution

An estimated 200 Peterborough residents keep chickens in their backyards at the moment. City council is planning to reduce their number to zero. That would be a shame. Chickens are not dirty, disease-spreading threats. If they were, disease would be spreading in 200 neighbourhoods.

Neither is there any evidence that chicken coops are attracting rats, weasels, foxes or other marauding critters.

Those concerns were presented last year when the movement to ban backyard coops started, largely as the result of a relatively small number of complaints from people who objected to their neighbours keeping chickens.

The disease and pestilence fears were debunked and council instructed city staff to draft regulations that would allow but more strictly control urban chickens.

Now council has changed its collective mind. Money is the new bogeyman.

The local humane society says it will cost $53,800 a year to police regulations and provide space for chickens seized from or abandoned by their owners.

Escaped chickens are not a concern. It’s hard to fly the coop when you can’t fly.

Several councillors who had voted to allow chickens on the sensible grounds that they are an effective and efficient example of “local food” production changed their minds when they saw the cost estimate.

So, if the ban on chickens is approved this coming Monday the city will reduce its potential costs by $53,800 a year, or as budget chairman Coun. Henry Clarke noted, more than $1 million over the next 20 years. Or will it? Some homeowners will inevitably defy the ban. The humane society will be required to confiscate their chickens, which means incurring most of the same costs: staff training to deal with chickens and space to keep them.

But would all those chickens actually be impounded? No. The bylaw would be enforced only when someone complained. That’s the way bylaw enforcement works.

As is the case now, there would be few complaints and few chickens would actually be seized.

That premise is backed up by a city survey that found 81 per cent of respondents think backyard chicken coops should be allowed.

The city also surveyed 15 Canadian municipalities regarding their chicken policies. Only three ban urban fowl. More to the point, several follow a sensible approach that would solve the chicken problem here: chicken keepers are required to get consent from their neighbours.

Adopt that regulation and the problem goes away. People who object to a chicken coop next door would not have to put up with one.

With peace on the chicken range the humane society would not need new staff to police chicken regulations nor space to hold felonious fowl.

It works in other communities and it can work here.