<p>My city.
I tried last year with the chickens using chicks. I lost two chicks when they failed to come home to daddy and died from exposure. Lost another two when they adopted my 90 yo MIL, and followed her too closely - she stepped on them.</p>
<p>DS Seattle residence as 4 chickens. The critters eat table scraps and dumper dived bread that is not eaten by the <em>friends</em>.</p>
<p>I have chickens, which until a pair of foxes showed up this spring and killed three of them, were free range. Now they have a pen, but they aren’t happy about it. I haven’t seen the foxes for a few weeks, so I’m considering letting the girls roam free again.</p>
<p>I live in a midwestern college town. The city council is considering allowing hens (no roosters) within city limits. One sticking point is the issue of whether one’s dog will be labeled ‘vicious’ if it dines on someone’s bird–apparently a common problem, according to the linked article.</p>
<p>Keeping the birds in a coop could be interesting in my neighborhood. We are constrained by one of those rule-heavy neighborhood covenants. We have rules against garden sheds and dog houses, but I don’t remember reading anything about chicken coops. I’m tempted to build one just to cause trouble.</p>
<p>I had chickens when I lived in Oakland and I loved having them. My hens gave me beautiful and very tasty eggs and kept my garden snail-free. I moved out of Oakland and bought a house with a yard thats too small to keep chickens in according to local ordinances (in Oakland one could keep chickens if they could be housed 20 feet from any building, here, further north in a small town, chickens have to be 40 feet from any building). In Oakland I did have problems with raccoons killing the chickens and once with a neighbor’s dog. Actually my own dog killed a chicken once and a friends dog did too but both times it was my fault for not supervising the dogs when the chickens were not in their coop - my problem was with the neighbors pitbull who got into the chicken coop and then refused to leave the yard after killing the chickens and the neighbor who refused to do anything about her dog which had taken up residence in my yard. I guess my chickens were tasty. I do miss having chickens in the yard. Sometimes I find myself wondering if anyone would notice a couple of bantam hens in my yard. I know neighbors have chickens as I hear their roosters crowing in the morning.</p>
<p>I had an accidental rooster at one point. (He was supposed to be a hen, but the chick sexer made a mistake, as they occasionally do.) I hated that bird. He was loud (they crow ALL day), aggressive, and vicious. We had to keep sticks or brooms on the back porch to beat him off. Going into the hen house to collect the eggs on a day when they didn’t go out was a two-person project. Finally, after he attacked me from the back and drew blood when I was walking up the porch steps I made good my threat to call the Asian guy who had a card up at the feed store, offering to come and take away poultry for eating. Frankly, if he ended up in a cockfight I couldn’t care less. That is what he wanted to do. After he was gone, my flock settled back into their old charming selves.</p>
<p>My mother was a city kid who spent a good deal of time as a foster child on a farm. To this day (she is in her late 70s) she talks about how she was terrorized by roosters, who chased her around and bit her. She might never visit if we get chickens.</p>
<p>Back in junior high a group of friends and I decided to build an incubator from a cardboard box and raise chicks. This was considered a “science project” at our school but I have no idea what we learned from it. Best friend’s mom took us out to a farm to get the eggs. I will never forget the day best friend and I were called out of class (worth it in itself) because her mom was on the phone to the school office frantically telling them the chicks were hatching. We ran to her house and watched them hatch. The chicks were very cute at first, but as they grew, well not so much. We took turns taking them to our houses until finally they went back to best friend’s house and her Italian grandpa (“Nono”) butchered them and they had a meal.</p>
<p>dmd, I was scratching my head as to what chicken-related word could possibly be bleeped out - goodness… LOL</p>
<p>My next-door neighbors had chickens, and the worst part about that was the rats that got attracted by the chicken feed. H was catching up to 10-15 rats per week until the neighbors got rid of the birds!!</p>
<p>As far ranging as discussions on this site are, I never anticipated a chicken topic. Right now we have 17 1 month old chicks. Tommorrow if it’s not raining they’ll have a chance to leave the coop and visit their run. After another month they’ll be free ranging during the day, back in the fortresslike coop at night.
I like having chickens, they are pretty, and have a lot of character, as well as delicious eggs.</p>
<p>And they can be quite tame. I had one once that insisted on being on my feet all the time. Just wanted to sit there. Some will come by name, and they follow me around just as the dogs and cats do. I wouldn’t call them loving pets–that’s a stretch–but they certainly do become…attached.</p>
<p>Dad discovered chicken raising late in life. He established a [herd, pack, gaggle?] of hens and one rooster in the backyard in the Puget Sound area. Ducks too. The rooster was Hell on wheels, attacking children who came a bit too close for comfort. And the hens were no pushovers either. One day they ambushed a sparrow who landed on their feed tray. Pecked it to death. Touchy little critters, those hens. Like other posters, Dad lost a hen or two to a neighborhood racoon. Had to build a chicken coop after that.</p>
<p>We grew up with bantams running everywhere. Like consololation, my mother had her head and later her ankle bloodied by our colorful but vicious rooster. HATED that bird. He terrorized our sweet-natured old bantam rooster and anyone else who came around. Don’t know why someone didn’t wring his neck. He’d get a high vantage point like a fence post and attack with his spurs. </p>
<p>Grandparents raised white leghorns. Every summer we’d go back to visit and my grandmother would go fetch “my” chicken from the previous year-- I always believed her. She could have just closed her eyes and pointed, it wouldn’t have made a difference.</p>
<p>I couldn’t get the WSJ link, but for me, the biggest downside to chickens or any other kind of livestock is rats. Hard to avoid.</p>
<p>Oh - I don’t want to scare anyone off, but anytime there’s feed/grain set out regularly, rats are bound to discover it – unless you have some chicken-friendly dogs or cats on patrol! We live in the 'burbs of L.I., and all our neighbors have wild turkey, foxes, sometimes even deer visit their yards. Not us, sadly. Am guessing that having two dogs (three, until just recently :() running around all the time has something to do with that.</p>