Oh to be a Chicken in Seattle
Good article on urban Chicken keeping in Seattle.
From the
Seattle Times:
Custom Coops
From penthouse perches to covered porches, city chickens are sitting pretty.
If I were a chicken, I'd want to live in Seattle.
As an urban chicken, you enjoy all the benefits of cosmopolitan Northwest living — without having to worry about the high cost of housing. (Poultry, here and everywhere, typically don't invest much thought in the vagaries of the real-estate market.)
Overcrowding wouldn't pose a problem because a city ordinance limits outdoor pets to three per household. Even in a small backyard, that's estate-size space. Especially compared to the residential density endured by country cousins who are commercially grown and forcibly crammed into tenement squawk boxes.
Key word here is Pet. Means you'll likely live out your natural life in a lovingly constructed custom home. Doesn't guarantee a Chicken McMansion, but sure beats the soup pot. (Castle du poulet trumps chicken cassoulet!)
Most folks who keep urban fowl say they raise the birds for spiritual sustenance rather than the meat. They find peace in watching their feathered friends scrabble and strut. They share organic eggs with neighbors. They take extraordinary delight in harvesting poultry poop for their garden.
Autumn, a Bantam (miniature) Aracauna chicken that lays blue-green eggs, likes hanging out the window of her nestbox and nibbling on pansies at the Queen Anne hen house built for her by Shelly Baker and Sonja Hunter. The hen house was on the Seattle Tilth city chicken-coop tour.
"Not to sound like a big hippie . . . but now that people are in this urban environment, they're searching for something to get back in touch with the earth," says Phil Megenhardt, city chicken instructor for Seattle Tilth. "I sort of teach it as a chicken-empowerment class."
Seattle may be the nation's only major metropolis to offer layfolks formal education in fowl fundamentals. In three years, Megenhardt graduated about 300 people from his course. This year's class, taught by Power Point whiz Amy Hagopian, was standing-room-only. If each chicken fancier went on to establish a flock and followed the three-chicken rule, that would add up to 1,000 chickens amongst us.
Chickens make awesome pets -- they are not "cuddly" to speak of but they are a lot of fun to watch, are great for keeping bugs down and they have fantastic personalities. I love our birds.
Posted by DaveH at May 30, 2007 8:51 PM