City Hall to eggs-amine backyard chicken program under 'equity lens'

Torontosun.com
Dec. 18

We hear Toronto City Hall has just ordered a probe into whether its backyard chicken program passes the “equity test.”

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Staff overseeing UrbanHensTO consulted with the city’s anti-racism and social development units and decided “further analysis is required to understand program inequities.”

“Well, get cracking,” councillors declared, in voting to extend the UrbanHensTO test run for another year while staff study it under “an equity lens.”

This has us in the wintry hinterland cackling and scratching our heads like leghorns on ground corn.

Up here, at the top of Lake Huron on Manitoulin Island, chickens are considered equal to any fowl. There is no pecking order.

Our farmers wring their necks with impartiality -- though perhaps there is some current seasonal bias toward turkeys.

There is certainly no backyard chicken program on Manitoulin despite vocal lobbying from island coyotes and bald eagles.

An unguarded Rhode Island Red would not last long in my “backyard.”

Our yards are populated by all manner of critters, from bears to quails to lynx to massive wolves.

People are always talking about birds and beasts up here, but never in the context of systemic racism. They’re all God’s creatures, we figure.

So, why the fuss in Toronto about anti-chicken bigotry?

(Ed. note: Strobel, you’re no spring chicken. Has retirement atrophied your brain? City Hall is not applying an “equity lens” to the actual chickens. It’s applying an “equity lens” to the program.)

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Aha, gotcha, Boss! And you might have a point. I just read the UrbanHensTO outline and diversity issues leap off the page.

For instance, while 80 backyards in the few test neighbourhoods now house a total of 234 chickens, roosters are banned.

That, dear woke reader, is called misandry. The social exclusion of males.

But it is hard to imagine chickens as a root cause of social division and ethnic conflict.

In fact, chickens are among the livestock world’s greatest unifiers. Cows and pigs are taboo for some religions. Most of us gag at the thought of eating Secretariat or My Friend Flicka, yet the French consume 18,000 tonnes of horsemeat a year.

Don’t even talk to me about those awful “wet markets” in China.

But EVERYBODY loves chicken. Except vegetarians, of course, but they’re more of a cult than a nationality, ethnic group or religion.

Even vegetarians, though, must love UrbanHensTO, since you are not allowed to eat your backyard chickens. You just keep taking the eggs, until your chickens die of natural causes.

One equity wrinkle City Hall will look at: “Marginalized communities” often live in apartments, where backyard chickens are just not happening. (A balcony chickens program isn’t likely to fly even with Toronto’s wingy councillors.)

Also, staffers say, one in five Toronto households is “food insecure,” which I assume is the woke term for hungry or underfed.

They say they will continue to monitor how UrbanHensTO supports “food sovereignty.” And, I’m sorry, I have no clue what that means. Free food? Stuff the Queen eats?

From up here, it appears Toronto politicians are even more chicken-hearted than they were when I retired in 2017.

They can’t see how silliness like piously viewing backyard chickens through an “equity lens” lessens the impact when it is applied where it matters -- like jobs, policing and education.

But Toronto city hall in recent years has not been noted for sincerity or common sense.

One of these days, the chickens will come home to roost.