Articles Tagged with chickens

The library regularly receives questions about raising chickens in urban areas (view previous blog posts on chickens here).   So, it’s not too surprising the Saturday (March 23) edition of The Oregonian’s Community News (West Metro) featured an article on the popularity of raising hens in Washington County.  As the article mentions, researching your local ordinances is important if you want to raise chickens on residential property.  For example, Hillsboro drafted new livestock, bee, and exotic animal regulations a few years ago and now has a permit process.  Beaverton also has codes relating to hens, and like Hillsboro, they don’t allow roosters.  Don’t overlook possible local regulations regarding building structures/enclosures for poultry (for example, Hillsboro requires a building permit for structures over a certain size, and Beaverton’s code specifies the minimum distance an enclosure has to be from a neighboring dwelling).

Other helpful resources include your local animal control office, code enforcement office, and extension service office. OSU’s Extension Service has offices throughout the state, and their poultry specialist was interviewed for The Oregonian’s article.

On a fun note, Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop by Reginald Bakeley recently won the Diagram Prize for oddest book title of the year.

As I walked out of a local store this past weekend I nearly tripped over a chicken, who was probably out for lunch (lots of veggie restaurants in my neighborhood).

This reminded me that we’re probably due for our annual “How many chickens can I keep on my property?” question. With prices for eggs and, sorry, chicken going up, the question may arise sooner rather than later.

Instead of giving The Answer, and there is seldom just one, I recommend you look up or contact one (or more) of the following:

“Give me a chicken over a stupid cat any day …” (from here)

What is it about chickens that makes people a little, well, funny? Today’s story on “chicken zoning,” so to speak, at KATU has some great lines in it, and then there was this a little while ago about a woman shooting her husband after he shot her pet chicken. We also get a few questions a year on “how many chickens …?” Maybe we need an Oregon Chicken Blog? No, maybe not.

I do also remember one of the funniest short stories I ever read was by H.E. Bates. A chicken played a major, if off-stage, role. It was titled, if I remember it correctly, “The World is Too Much With Us,” (yes, after the Wordsworth poem – but well before it became over-quoted ;-). (And for those of you not poetically inclined (I’m not really either), you should know H.E. Bates if only because his “Darling Buds of May,” made into a multi-part series by the BBC was the break-out movie for Catherine Zeta-Jones. Librarians are so full of it, aren’t we?