Don’t count your eggs before your chickens are legal.
Seems there are some little urban farmers among us. They say “Legalize it,” with “it” referring to keeping birds and livestock in our nation’s cities. And then there are those who think urban farming is bullshit. Both sides are represented in a hilarious story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (the best part of which was the chicken penciled in inimitable Journal style). The clucking raised by a woman keeping some hens outside her house in Salem, Ore. reaches a fever pitch when the head of a neighborhood association says, “It’s like she has some underground railroad for chickens.”
The story unearths illegal coops in Miami as well, while focusing on the legalization battle in Salem and pointing to the few urban communities, such as Madison, Wisconsin that have reversed chicken bans. But there are some even more intriguing contraband chickens not mentioned in the story. Let’s call them “Fight Club.”
There is word of an underground chicken coop in an ethnic enclave of Greenpoint, Brooklyn (just blocks from Williamsburg — where one can’t find a decent studio for under $1,500 a month, forget about keeping livestock), though those chickens are probably kept for the entertaining cock fights, not for food.
