The Future Of Urban Chicken Advocacy | Chicken Coop Hartford Ct

The Future Of Urban Chicken Advocacy


Urban chicken lovers in the Denver area provide us a glimpse of the next front in urban chicken advocacy work: the streamlining of the process to obtain a permit for backyard hens.

Theres a nice post by Joel Warner over on Westword that explores the issues confronting those in the Denver area who arent just happy that urban chickens are legal (a struggle many of us are in the throes of now), but are trying to lower the barriers to getting the permits to keep their chickens.
"The current process for obtaining a chicken permit in Denver is cumbersome and expensive and I want to change the law not just for my own personal benefit but also for the good of the Denver community," says Denver lawyer and would-be chicken owner James Bertini. Hes so annoyed over the complexities of obtaining permission to keep fowls and other kinds of livestock here that hes launched a movement to push city council to simplify the process.
I wish that municipalities would put simple processes on the books off the bat instead of creating byzantine bureaucracies to make getting a permit more difficult than getting a five-year-old hen to lay an egg.

Im all for simplified processes, but I wonder if its too high a hurdle to clear when first attempting to get urban chicken laws on the books? From watching things unfold in Durham and Longmont, it seems the room for compromise between NO and YES is meted out in the restrictions and permit process.

Should you aim for simplicity when trying to convince your Council to legalize urban chickens? Of course! But be prepared for push back, and be flexible (within limits) in adding restrictions to the urban chicken ordinance to give the nay-sayers some comfort that the town wont be overrun by peepers overnight.

Then once the shock and awe of urban chickens in backyards across town wears off, you can set about making the process to own urban chickens as easy as owning a cat or dog.

The Future Of Urban Chicken Advocacy