Loco For Locavores

The Southland Scrambles to Make Room For Your Backyard Chickens

“I’ll never get caught, I’m popular.” Photo: Steve-L-Johnson/Flickr

L.A. might be crazy for chicken once it hits the plate, but having your own little cluckers scratching around the backyard is becoming such a booming trend that local governments are considering revising existing laws. As raising chickens becomes the “in” move for certain city-dwellers, many in the Southland region are crying fowl** over bans that prohibit backyard chickens. The laws are mostly perceived to be antiquated ones from another era, no matter that one could probably argue that keeping farm animals from smelling up your house was once considered an evolutionary step forward from our agrarian past.

Pasadena Star-News reports that many cities within Los Angeles County and surrounding areas currently limit the number of chickens people can legally keep, while cities like Whittier, Montebello, Ontario, and San Dimas still ban them outright. Recently, San Marino voted to allow residents to keep their own chickens, overturning a long-held ban, while and Long Beach and San Gabriel are both pressing to undo their own bans on the egg-laying pets.

While the cities scramble to get with the times, chicken-rearing is generating companies like Backyard Farms, Urban Homestead, and BackyardChickens.org. People who are jumping on the bandwagon extol the many advantages of leading your own flock, be it the bountiful eggs, closeness to nature, or simply geeking out of watching the birds go by. Backyard farms’ Mike Scott says, “One of my favorite things to do is sit outside with a glass of wine and watch the chickens peck and look for bugs.”

On the other side of the boom, Jordanne Dervaes of Urban Homestead warns that chicken-rearing is a big responsibility that might be taken too lightly as the trend flourishes. “Now it is a trend and as with every trend people don’t adhere to basic things you need to do to take care of an animal…I’ve seen the good and the bad.”

Backyard chicken bans causing a stir in Southland cities

Read more: http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_22477346/backyard-chicken-bans-causing-stir-southland-cities#ixzz2JUcWfwFX
[PSN]

**The cited article never uses this overplayed pun, so we figured somebody had to.

The Southland Scrambles to Make Room For Your Backyard Chickens