City hall should let chickens roost at home

Hearing about Nikki Pike’s fight with city hall to keep her therapy hens, the light dawned.

My uncle Tom kept lots of hens in the council house backyard where he still lived with his mother, despite being in his late 40s. He had pigeons, too. Visiting as a kid was like entering your own private petting zoo.

He never had a wife or job, but was happy in that backyard, surrounded by those clucking and cooing critters. It, too, was therapy, though the word wasn’t in vogue 50 years ago.

Tom was a paratrooper during the war and, in the early hours of Tuesday, June 6, 1944, he floated to Earth, landing in a dark Norman field behind enemy lines. He told my mother what he’d done in the months that followed, how many people he killed. It was the one time he spoke about it, she being the favourite among his 12 brothers and sisters.

But she didn’t need details. She already knew this wasn’t the same young man who left to serve.

So, a half-century later, reading about Nikki, who suffers from anxiety and depression, it dawned on me why my uncle loved those silly hens.

Yet Nikki’s plight points to a broader trend, one increasingly separating us from each other.

It’s easy to tease civic administration over enforcing petty rules, but in reality, they’re simply addressing citizens’ wishes. Chickens? Heck, we don’t even want cats prowling, nor backyard barbecues, playhouses, kids playing hockey in the street, secondary suites, noisy motorbikes, others’ cars parked out front, grass too long, yards with dandelions.

Ask a Calgary planning official and she’ll admit we don’t really want others near us at all.

That’s just a start. Increasingly, we live isolated lives with few relatives, faceless neighbours, yet dozens of Facebook friends, but none that pop around for a chat unannounced — doing so these days would be the height of bad manners.

Our kids invariably sit with eyes and ears glued to a smartphone or video screen, while us adults increasingly shop online and pick up mail from a street corner box instead of from that nice postman who’d stop, say hello, and hand you a strange object called a letter from a friend.

Does this matter? Well, a recent U.S. study shows rates of depression, loneliness and corresponding thoughts of suicide are skyrocketing among teenagers. Sure, the days when kids would stand on street corners sometimes did indeed prove the adage they were only up to no good, but back then, we liked real friends and had proper, face-to-face conversations.

Today, we scream abuse at strangers on social media, while declaring we “like” inane videos of others looking for desperate approval by pretending some stage-managed silliness happened by accident and, good grief, they just happened to be filming that exact spot.

Meanwhile, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence will soon mean when we do venture out for a pizza or arrive at a bricks and mortar store or bank, we’ll be served by robots and not by living, breathing humans.

This is a long journey from Nikki and her hens. And it’s even further from the days of my youth; one without phones, cars or even a TV, but instead, strange yet wonderful uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbours, bill collectors, postmen, dustbin men, delivery people and the occasional passing gypsies, as cats and dogs ran wild, along with dozens of kids on every street corner playing weird games such as Hide and seek and Kick the can.

We remain social animals, whether we like it or not. Yet, step by step, we’re building a reclusive and divisive society with artificial friends and myriad self-imposed rules, trapping us in our own safe cocoons.

So hopefully, city hall will let Nikki keep her hens. Give her some pigeons, too, if she wants them.

Maybe the neighbourhood kids could come around and look after them some weekend. It’s a small step, but we’ve got to start somewhere.

Ask a Calgary planning official and she’ll admit we don’t really want others near us at all.