Chicago, home to chickens

<p>CHICAGO</p><p>Just past a busy intersection in this neighborhood on Chicago's West Side, a flock of hens softly cluck about the yard, seemingly oblivious to the stares of a nearby alley cat.</p><p>They are "like pets with eggs," said Donna Knezek, who along with her partner Liz Sharp keeps five hens in a chicken coop outside her home in Chicago's East Garfield Park neighborhood. "It's important to know where your food comes from."</p><p>Odd as it may sound, it's legal to keep chickens and roosters in Chicago (though slaughtering the animals is prohibited.) A year ago, an alderman from the Southwest Side failed to advance an ordinance banning the barnyard animals from their city roosts.</p><p>Closer to home, the city of Sonoma earlier this year passed an ordinance allowing residents to have 16 chickens regardless of the size of their lots, providing they get a permit. They ordinance banned roosters, however.</p><p>The idea of raising chickens has increasingly become more attractive to urbanites, especially "locavores" who like knowing their plate of eggs came from their own back yard. The birds also eat bugs and weeds, they happily devour food scraps like wilted lettuce and carrot tops, and their manure can be composted into garden fertilizer.</p><p>Signs of the burgeoning urban chicken movement include a bi-monthly magazine called Backyard Poultry, which started publishing in 2006, as well as popular Web sites and blogs including BackyardChickens.com and urbanchickens.net.</p><p>"It's exploding all over the country," said Martha Boyd, program director for Angelic Organics Learning Center, which offered a workshop in Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood on basic backyard chicken care for city residents last month.</p><p>Within 48 hours, the 30-spot workshop had sold out. Angelic plans to hold another class March 21.</p><p>Tom Rosenfeld, one of the workshop instructors, said he is floored by the amount of interest.</p><p>"We've finally gone over the top in this corporate food delivery system." he said. "It's about connecting much closer to (one's) food."</p><p>An organic apple farmer, Rosenfeld has been keeping hens at his home for more than three years. But unlike many of the urban chicken enthusiasts he meets, Rosenfeld does not name the birds. For him, the birds are not pets.</p><p>"I wanted the eggs," he said.</p><p>He appears to be in the minority. Diane Blaszczyk pets her chickens and lets them jump on her lap. She said her birds "beg like dogs" for scraps.</p><p>She and her husband, Mark, keep nine hens and a rooster in the Old Norwood Park neighborhood. In August, once their hens started laying, they stopped buying eggs from the grocery store.</p><p>Tara Keating and her husband, Frank Geilen, got hooked after visiting a booth at a street festival in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood this summer. Already committed to composting, organic gardening and commuting by bike, the idea of raising chickens just made sense.</p><p>They now keep four hens -- Kippie, Poekie, Dotty and Pickles -- in a coop they installed inside their condominium's garden.</p><p>Their hens eat only organic feed, about $22 for a 50-pound-bag, plus the cost of shipping, because the family does not own a car. Baby chickens themselves are cheap -- often as little as a dollar and change apiece -- and can be ordered online.</p><p>Keating estimated that the coop, chicken wire and feeders cost them about $500. "You are not going to make money," she said of the venture.</p><p>Shawn Peek fashioned a coop out of cupboards her family found in the alley, plus scrap lumber. Her family has three hens and a rooster in the Albany Park community in Chicago. Peek thought she'd bought four hens, but the birds are hard to sex as chicks. So far, Peter, their rooster, hasn't disturbed neighbors with his early morning crowing, Peek said.</p><p>The crowing is something urban chicken advocates caution against. It can be loud and annoying, Boyd said.</p><p>The noise is in part is what motivated Chicago Alderman Lona Lane to try and prohibit chicken and roosters in Chicago in November. Lane has other concerns as well. She railed against the ritual slaughtering of chickens, which remains illegal, and she fears the birds might spread disease.</p><p>Lane lost the fight to outlaw the birds in Chicago's residential neighborhoods, but she said she is considering legislation after the holidays to ban the birds just in the slice of Chicago she represents.</p><p>"All things considered, I think chickens honestly should be raised on the farm and not in densely populated areas such as the 18th Ward," Lane said about two weeks ago</p><p>Boyd disagreed and called ward-by-ward chicken legislation a bad idea.</p><p>"Like anything, there is good care and bad care," she said, adding that her group's workshops are intended to help teach responsible ownership.</p><p>Francine Bradley, a poultry specialist at the UC Davis Cooperative Extension, said fears about chicken-to-human contact are overblown.</p><p>"Obviously, if there was a (disease) problem, the human and chicken bond wouldn't be as old and long-lived as it is," she said, adding that the birds produce far less waste than dogs or cats do.</p><p>Bradley counsels owners to keep chickens in secure coops and not to leave feeders out at night.</p><p>Beyond that, she calls chickens "an inexpensive form of therapy" -- peaceful, soothing animals that can even be trained to ride on the handlebars of a bike.</p><p>"Chickens respond very well to kindness," she said.</p>