Backyard chickens in Toronto won't cause the sky to fall

A whole lot of Torontonians are madder than a wet hen over city council's decision to allow a pilot project that would permit people to keep backyard chickens.

Thestar.com
Oct. 6, 2017
By Rosie Dimanno

Alektorophobia: Fear of chickens.

"We got chicken in the barn, whose barn, what barn, my barn/Come on over baby" - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On, Jerry Lee Lewis

Personally, I'm not crazy about chickens, until they turn up on my plate. Always found them rather ... broody. Understandable when we take their unhatched babies away soon as they're laid.

Maybe I was traumatized as a child - weren't we all, about something or another - when, periodically, my mother, clad in one of my father's plaid flannel jackets (at 4-foot-11, they came to her knees), Wellingtons and a head scarf, with axe in hand, would disappear into the garage, there to commit murder most fowl upon a few dozen hens from Kensington Market. When she emerged, hours later, my mom looked like Sissy Spacek in Carrie after the bucket 'o blood had been dumped on her head at the prom.

But chicken broth, made from scratch, I loved that, with pastina and tiny meatballs.

Peasant ways.

A whole lot of Toronto city folks, judging by letters to the editor, turn up their urban noses at live poultry scratching about. They're madder than a wet hen over city council's decision this past week permitting a pilot project that would allow people to keep up to four hens in the yard. Gotta have a yard. And only allowed in four wards, the pilot undertaking running for three years. And humanely maintained or there will be tar and feathering from the animals rights brigades, possibly PETA protesters showing up naked on your front lawn.

Don't go selling any eggs either, to make a wee bit of profit. That's verboten. No roosters either because cock-a-doodling at the break of dawn might disturb the neighbours. Unlike, say, garbage trucks banging bins and crushing trash at 7 a.m. Or the endless construction - jackhammers, cement trucks churning, backhoes beeping - at just about any hour of the day or night because believe you me they don't abide by noise regulations.

Cities are by their nature noisy places, a constant assault on the ears. But roosters, that's a crow too far.

In any event, hens, an elevated species, don't need roosters to lay eggs. Unfertilized eggs, however - cock-less - don't produce chicks. Which just about exhausts my knowledge on the subject.

Toronto, amongst the most anal of cities, with a simultaneously inferiority and superiority complex, must figure itself insufficiently removed from Hogtown days, wanting no reminder of its hayseed past. That accounts for the snooty hysterics, in some ratepayer quarters, over council loosening its corset on the prohibited animals bylaw.

Montreal, a far more sophisticated metropolis, doesn't mind backyard chicken coops. New York City doesn't mind backyard chicken coops. Ditto London, as in England.

You'd think, as the little red hen squawked alarmingly - or was that Chicken Little - that the sky was falling, such was the cluster-cluck from some councillors who voted against the motion (with city staff also disapproving). Councillor Stephen Holyday warned about "the introduction of livestock into the city" as if next cattle will be herded through our streets. Preferable to cyclists, I say.

From a letter to the editor in a certain Toronto tabloid: "Permission to raise any chicken at all will be taken as carte blanche by many to raise lots of meat for local butcher shops and restaurants, by passing (sic) safety meat inspectors and in keeping with traditional 'culture' practices."

Oh yes, it's all those other sorts of people stirring up the chicken in every pot and backyard; the ones whose cooking smells offend the nostrils, all that curry and garlic and cardamom. Same immigrant-clinger bumpkins with tomato plants out back and, once upon an Anglo-cracker time, cabbage plants out front.

Dirty beasts, those chickens, likely to attract rats and raccoons, as if they need a hen-invitation. And, oy, the stinky poop! Although wouldn't amount to a hill of turd compared to the estimated 657 kilos of guano dropped on Toronto yearly by every single Canada goose.

But what, asked Councillor Frances Nunziata, if a chicken, gosh, escaped? All Points Bulletin: Pullet on the loose! Description: Black with a red hoodie.

At least equinophobes can rest easy. Toronto remains a no-go zone for jackasses.

Except maybe not so much around city hall.