In The Hoboken Chicken Emergency—a quirky 1977 children’s novel by Daniel Pinkwater—a kid named Arthur Bobowicz is sent out to buy the family’s Thanksgiving turkey and instead returns home with a live chicken. And not just any chicken: a 266-pound chicken, sold to him by Professor Mazzochi, a relatively benign mad scientist who breeds “superchickens” in his walk-up apartment.
Once they get over their initial shock, Arthur’s easygoing parents opt for a meatloaf Thanksgiving dinner and agree to let Arthur keep the chicken—he names her Henrietta—as a pet. “Every boy should have a chicken,” his agreeable Poppa says.
The rest of Hoboken is not so sure. When Arthur takes Henrietta out for a walk, it creates a mild panic; when he reluctantly returns her to the professor and she promptly escapes, the level of panic rises to full-blown. “It was looking right through the Venetian blinds!” reports one hysterical chicken-sighter. “A monster! A gorilla! All white, with red eyes! It was a gorilla as big as a horse!”
The moral: perhaps a city isn’t the best place for a good-natured but misunderstood 266-pound chicken who can climb fire escapes and breaks into restaurant kitchens in search of frozen French fries.
But across the country, more and more cities are opening their arms to the traditional, normal-sized chicken, the kind that prefers to hang out near its coop dining on chicken scratch and the occasional tasty mealworm. Communities such as Portland, Ore., Austin and Madison have passed laws in recent years to allow residents to raise chickens in urban neighborhoods. Some cities—perhaps most notably New York—place no restrictions on backyard broods.
In the Valley, of course, chickens have long been a familiar part of the landscape in rural towns, and are becoming increasingly popular with non-farmers who like the idea of fresh eggs coming straight from their yards. Now efforts are underway to allow backyard chickens in some of the Valley’s most densely populated urban communities. Last fall, proponents began circulating a petition calling on the Springfield City Council to create an ordinance allowing residents to keep “a small number” of hens in their yards. And earlier this month, Holyoke Ward 4 City Councilor Tim Purington introduced an order that would allow residents there to keep chickens with a permit from the Board of Health.
If his efforts succeed, Holyoke will join a wave of newly chicken-friendly cities. But to get there, proponents will have to get past resistance that can be traced to concerns about property rights and property values, fears about squawking birds and smelly coops—not to mention biases rooted in racial and socioeconomic assumptions.
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Purington can’t remember exactly where he first got the idea to take up the backyard chicken cause, although he suspects it made its way to him through the “eclectic” social network he’s developed living in and representing a downtown neighborhood. Perhaps, he said, someone first planted the notion in his head during one of the regular trash cleanup days he does with his neighbors in Ward 4, when constituents often approach him with ideas and suggestions.
Purington began to do some research and found plenty to support the idea that urban chickens are an entirely workable proposition—including a 2008 research paper, by a University of New Mexico graduate student named KT LaBadie, called “Residential Urban Chicken Keeping: An Examination of 25 Cities.” (LaBadie and her husband run a website, urbanchickens.org, “dedicated to promoting backyard chickens in urban residential landscapes.”)
“There are a variety of reasons why people want to keep chickens, ranging from having a safe source of protein to gaining a closer relationship to the food they consume,” LaBadie wrote in her paper. “Those who are opposed to backyard chickens, however, often express concerns about noise, smells, diseases, or the potential for chickens running loose. There is also debate between the two sides as to the appropriateness of chickens in a city environment and if chickens qualify as pets or livestock.”
LaBadie compared chicken ordinances in communities including New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Baltimore, Charlotte and St. Louis with the goal of “defin[ing] the components of a just and well functioning chicken ordinance.” In the end, she concluded, “There is no superior ‘one size fits all’ ordinance to regulate urban chickens, as each city has different physical, environmental, social, and political needs.”
Some of the communities she studied limit the number of birds that can be kept (with four to six the most common limit). Some forbid slaughtering; others ban roosters, with their noisy wake-up calls. Most include rules that require that coops be placed a certain distance from neighbors’ houses.
In general, a good ordinance, LaBadie wrote, is one that is clearly defined, that does not discriminate against certain populations (poor people, people with small properties), that’s developed with citizens’ input and that allows for flexibility.
In Holyoke, Purington’s proposal calls for backyard chickens to be allowed by permit from the Board of Health. As in other communities, the city could set specific restrictions: how big the flock could be, whether people could have a rooster, what kind of coops or cages would be allowed. “This is not major, ground-breaking work,” Purington told the Advocate, pointing to the many existing ordinances in other cities that Holyoke could use as models.
Nonetheless, his proposal already appears to be meeting with high-level opposition. At the April 6 City Council meeting where Purington introduced his order, Holyoke Police Chief Anthony Scott offered an immediate dismissive response: “Man, you’ve got to be kidding me. Chickens?” Scott was quoted saying in the Springfield Republican.
Among the problems Scott predicted: noise, public health risks—and cock-fighting. Meanwhile, City Health Director Daniel Bresnahan, while calling for more research on the proposal before it goes to a Council vote, offered his own less-than-optimistic take. “Shooting from the hip, I think it’s going to be a problem,” said Bresnahan, who worries that legalized chickens would open the door to demands for backyard goats, horses and pigs.
In the end, councilors voted to send Purington’s order to the Ordinance Committee for further evaluation. After the meeting, Purington told the Advocate he was taken off guard by the negative reactions the proposal received. “Surprisingly, people seemed really angry,” he said, noting that some councilors seemed suspicious of his reasons for introducing the idea, as if he had some hidden agenda.
“My hidden agenda is: I want chickens,” Purington said. “It’s a logical evolution of our city ordinances to allow this.”
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Not all Purington’s Council colleagues are hostile to the backyard chicken idea. At-large Councilor Rebecca Lisi has signed on in support. Ward 2 Councilor Diosdado Lopez noted that, for Puerto Ricans, keeping chickens is a cultural tradition.
And therein, it appears, lies at least part of the resistance. Among the many comments posted on Masslive.com in response to the Republican article on the April 6 meeting were a number from writers who seemed especially rankled by the association of backyard chickens and Puerto Rican culture. “If keeping live chickens in ones [sic] home is part of the Puerto Rican culture, then why don’t they move Puerto Rico where it is permited [sic],” wrote one anonymous poster.
“Pehgaps [sic] Councilor Lopez should instruct his constituents that they are now living in the United States and not some third world dirt farm,” offered another (who apparently missed school the day they taught that Puerto Rico is, in fact, a territory of the United States).
Purington described some of the comments he read there as having an “underlying kind of racist tone, without being directly racist,” and reducing the issue to something that pertains only to “those Latinos.” That’s ironic, he noted, given that, from what he’s seen, “the urban chicken is really a white, middle-class movement.”
“Movement” is the right word. While hard numbers are elusive, the rise, nationally, in both municipal chicken ordinances and in grassroots backyard chicken groups suggests a real trend, one that fits into the larger movement focused on local food, sustainable food production and a general return-to-the-land sentiment. Once you’ve signed up for your local farm share and set up your backyard composting operation, adding a few hens to the mix just might seem like the logical next step.
In the Valley, backyard chicken farmers can find support in the Pioneer Valley Backyard Chicken Association, which has a website with information on raising chickens, holds public events like a recent “coop tour” and offers private consultations to would-be chicken farmers. While most Valley backyard chicken flocks reside in rural neighborhoods, there’s no reason they couldn’t be raised in urban areas, too, said PVBCA founder Meg Taylor. As in communities like Portland, Ore., Madison and Austin, the laws can be written to ensure that backyard flocks do not interfere with neighbors’ rights—for instance, a law can limit the number of birds, or impose health and safety standards.
The racially tinged comments aside, some of the opposition expressed in Holyoke springs from more general concerns about chickens being too noisy or smelly for tightly packed neighborhoods and fears that they will bring a rundown, unkempt feel to a city that already has its problems with blight and neglect. But chicken coops, if properly cared for, should pose no such problems, Taylor said. Hens are quiet, and coops can be kept clean with the proper care. (“It takes a lot for a coop to smell,” she said.)
Banning chickens “makes no sense,” Taylor continued. “They’re quieter than a dog. Your neighbors’ dogs bark. Your neighbors’ dogs get out and harass your cat, or whatever. Three hens in a coop, you won’t even know they’re there.”
If chicken owners don’t take proper care of their chickens, she added, “their neighbors should complain. If it smells really bad, that’s a health issue, and they’re not being responsible. But just because some people are irresponsible with their dogs, that doesn’t mean they’re not allowed.”
Backyard chickens aren’t only culturally important to Puerto Ricans, Taylor noted; in some cities, they’ve long been an integral part of the Asian community, as they have in traditionally Italian-American neighborhoods. “It doesn’t matter where you live—you’re going to have your chickens,” she said. “It’s just a part of how you live.”
New backyard chicken farmers are typically white, well-educated people in their 20s and 30s, often with kids, Taylor noted. Looking at the response to Purington’s proposal in Holyoke, she said, “If it was some white people spearheading this—’I want the hens for the experience of my kids hatching out eggs, and having this learning experience’— it would be a very different response.”
The local-food movement, Taylor added, “can be very elitist.” But as communities tackle the problem of food insecurity, they need “to embrace and acknowledge cultural food norms, and cultural food values, and chickens are part of that.”
If Holyoke’s wannabe chicken farmers are to succeed, they’d do well to look at efforts in other communities. Activists in other places have tried a range of political strategies, Taylor noted: petition drives, rallies, educational programs. “There’s a lot of different ways to go to it,” she said. “Some have failed. It really just depends on the support you have, and the people on the Council. … It comes down to personality and power.”
Purington plans to use the time his proposal spends in the City Council’s Ordinance Committee to do more research and talk to more people interested in the issue. “I feel like we have a lot of work to do before it can really get a fair hearing,” he said.
