Keeping chickens as pets, for eggs, meat, or for eating pests is popular in urban and suburban areas. Some people sell the eggs for side income.
Keeping chickens in an urban environment is a type of urban agriculture, important in the local food movement, which is the growing practice of cultivating, processing and distributing food in or around a village, town or city. According to National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service and experts in backyard agriculture, there are a host of personal benefits associated with urban agriculture and keeping chickens in one's own backyard.
History
Keeping livestock in cities has been common throughout history and is still practiced in many parts of the world. For example, 50,000 pigs were being kept in Manhattan in 1859. But local ordinances were created to limit this, owing to the noise and smell nuisance, and these were relaxed only in times of war when the urban populace was encouraged to provide food for itself.
Urban relief gardens played an important role in sustaining large populations of Americans during economic depressions. War gardens played an important role in the nationwide effort to help win both World War I and World War II. Backyard chickens have become a common practice in the United States. These victory gardens made gardening a patriotic activity and introduced gardening as an activity for everyone, not just those too poor to buy their own food. Later, in the late 1960s and 1970s, community gardening started to make a comeback as a hobby. Organic gardening, urban animal husbandry, and community farms became popular and many cities around the country started community gardening programs for their residents.
Revival
In Canada and the United States, the raising of chickens on urban, suburban, and small town residential lots has become increasingly popular. For example, in Madison, Wisconsin, citizens formed a group called the Chicken Underground, overturned a ban upon domestic chickens and there are now 81 registered owners. A film titled Mad City Chickens was made about their campaign. More and more cities that had previously banned urban chickens are removing old regulations or making permits easier to obtain.
Policies toward keeping chickens vary by country or city. Other cities with urban chicken programs and activists include Halifax, New York City, Portland, Oregon, Seattle and Vancouver.
In the UK, the keeping of chickens has also grown in popularity with as many as 200,000 households involved. Sales of the fashionable Eglu hen house increased ten-fold between 2004 and 2009.
Commercial vs. backyard egg production
Commercial egg production has been associated with salmonella and other disease outbreaks in the United States. Poor sanitation and crowded hen houses have contributed to these problems. Expansion of the poultry industry, fueled by an increased demand for poultry products, has created a demand for high throughout poultry and egg production. The resulting increased poultry population density and the rearing of incompatible poultry species in close proximity have presented major disease challenges. Studies have shown that small scale, backyard chicken keeping/egg production reduces these potential disease risks. Historically, avian infectious diseases were not appreciated for their ability to influence populations and were relatively neglected for their part in causing species declines.
According to Mench et al., although changes in commercial egg production systems are being driven largely by animal welfare concerns, it is clear that other aspects of such changes must be considered to ensure sustainable egg production. Sustainability is a complex topic. Elements of sustainability include economics, environmental effects, human health and safety, and social values in addition to animal welfare. Backyard egg production has been suggested as a solution to sustainable, healthy food supply for families.