Tricia Edgar | Friday 6th November 2009
I want chickens. However, given that my yard space is no more than six meters long, I think that this may be an unrealistic goal. Seriously, though, urban agriculture has branched out in recent years, and one of its more prominent branches is the idea of keeping farm animals in urban environments, mostly for eggs and milk, sometimes for meat. While backyard vegetable gardens and community garden plots are considered to be relatively innocuous in many urban areas, the idea of livestock in cities can be a little more difficult to sell.
Different cultures have different ideas about the social acceptability of urban livestock. In Asia, animals have been a socially-acceptable part of cities for centuries because they are used to turn waste into food. In Africa, early colonial powers resisted the idea of urban livestock as backward, yet the practice prevailed. In Europe and the United States, the keeping of urban livestock has historically been a fringe activity that is rarely discussed. Many of the world's urban farmers are landless and rely on restaurant scraps and the leavings of urban horticulture to feed their animals.
While urban livestock provide a valuable source of food and income, these animals are often feared as a source of noise and disease. In urban areas where rats roam the sewers and cars zoom busily around the streets, fears about the potential disease and noise from urban chickens seem a little extreme, but these fears are there. While all animals bring the potential for disease, access to veterinary services and good public health codes can moderate potential problems. Some argue that keeping small flocks of urban chickens may actually be a solution to controlling disease outbreaks like avian flu, since birds in urban, free-range flocks have smaller populations than those in factory farms, and therefore there is a smaller chance that the virus will spread and mutate.
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