NOR DICITY
Al Pope, June 19, 2009
Which came first, kitty litter or the egg?
Whitehorse senior planner Mike Ellis was surprised earlier this year to discover that there’s a sizeable interest in raising backyard chickens in the city. During a round of public consultations the idea came up repeatedly, and 58% of respondents to a survey were in favour of rescinding the ban on urban chickens.
To his credit, Ellis saw sense in the idea, telling the Yukon News, “We allow dogs in backyards; are chickens really that much more of a nuisance?” On the other hand, being a senior city planner, he has to move cautiously. Quoting the News story again, “This is obviously something that needs more research,” said Ellis. “We’re not just going to jump into this right away.”
By an interesting coincidence, the article appears on the Yukon News web page next to a story about the blessing of the pets at the local United Church. In the name of religious freedom let me just say that people have every right to consecrate their four-legged friends as they see fit. Bless ‘em all, I say. Where would we be without them?
But the juxtaposition of these two stories illustrates a curious fact about human attitudes toward our fellow creatures. It appears that the trait most likely to get a lower species criminalized in the modern urban setting is function. What separates a chicken from the sanctified status of a pet, other than the fact that she works for a living?
The pet dog, a creature of resolute uselessness, and the cat, a wanton destroyer of wild birds but otherwise as redundant as it is lazy, are blessed not only by city ordinance, but by the Creator of the Universe Himself, while the hardworking chicken may have to wait years for the simple right to reside outside of designated rural zones.
“Cleanliness and noisy roosters” are cited in the News article as reasons for delaying the decriminalization of urban chickens in Whitehorse, possibly for years. Again, the double standard appears to be based on a scale of uselessness.
When a chicken is guilty of uncleanliness the result is a high-nitrogen fertilizer that can help you to grow your own vegetables, and even your own chicken feed. By fertilizing naturally, the urban gardener avoids the cost and the toxicity of chemical fertilizers and helps to sequester carbon, fighting global warming.
By contrast, when your dog or cat, blessed or otherwise, commits an unclean act, the result is not only foul, it’s useless. Pet manure contains toxins that render it unsuitable for composting. If not left to stink up the backyard or the sidewalk where it fell, it is carted to the landfill with discarded batteries and unrecycled recyclables. In the case of cats it’s usually contaminated by chemical-filled kitty litter.
At the end of a useful and productive career the hard-working hen gives her all to the soup pot, providing a tasty meal in death as in life. Try that with Fido or Tiddles, and you will run afoul of pet lovers, soup eaters, and possibly the Supreme Deity, if the pet in question has been consecrated.
As for noise, a crowing cock serves a function, should you wish to arise at dawn. North of Sixty, where summer sunrise comes at about two o’clock in the morning, this can be a nuisance, but compared to a barking dog, or to the serenade of a courting cat, it is sweet music indeed.
And – male readers might want to brace themselves for this – the average backyard flock can get along perfectly well without a cock, so long as new chicks are available for purchase. Hens will lay eggs every bit as tasty, and every bit as rich in vitamins and minerals, with or without Old Chanticleer on the job.
A chicken, as the great Cab Calloway once pointed out, ain’t nothing but a bird, but even among birds it’s discriminated against. There is nothing in the bylaws to prevent you from keeping a budgie, a parrot, or practically any exotic avian dragged against its will from pleasanter climates. Why is a chicken so different?
Again, it all comes down to status. If a parrot is a diva, a chicken is a peasant. While one struts its colours and shows off its vocabulary in a gilded cage, the other gets up every morning, shakes itself off, and goes to work. A struggling agricultural worker, the chicken uncomplainingly provides healthy food and clean manure every day, without so much as a Sunday off.
Hey wait a minute, maybe that’s it. Maybe chickens could join the ranks of the blessed if they’d just pick up on that best of Christian habits, the lazy Lord’s Day. Breeders, to work! Come up with a chicken that lays eggs six days a week, and on the seventh, rests.
Of course, even the six-day hen will never reach the status of the pet dog, whose whole life is recreational, nor of the cat, who sleeps seven days a week and only stretches itself occasionally to clean up the local robin population, but it will surely be a start. With just a little effort, even the lowly hen may one day enjoy her day in the urban sun.
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