Pecks and the City
Fowl play or good eggs? Minneapolis poultry owners assert their flocks' right to roost.
By Rachel Hutton
Photo by Curtis Johnson
(page 3 of 3)
Maintaining a flock is fairly simple, though it’s not a commitment to be taken lightly. A chicken’s average lifespan is five to seven years, but they’ve been known to live twice that long. Chickens eat about a quarter of a pound of food a day, and, in addition to their feed, they’ll eat grass clippings, weeds, and even oatmeal and popcorn. “They like the quick calorie just like we do,” notes Rebecca Polston, Willcütt’s “Chickens” co-instructor. Each day, owners must let the birds in and out of the coop—and collect the eggs. “I wish I had a nickel for everyone who thinks that you need a rooster to get eggs,” Willcütt says. Hens ovulate approximately once a day and produce one egg, no rooster required. Roosters are necessary for baby chicks, though if an egg has been fertilized, it’s still edible as long as it hasn’t been incubated.
While roosters aren’t necessary for eggs, hen owners still had reason to be concerned about the ban: would Animal Control try to prohibit all poultry raising? A spokesperson for the department said the rooster ban was initiated because of a number of complaints about crowing, which many chicken owners suspect were related to illegal roosters. Law-abiding owners suggested that noise complaints about roosters be handled like barking-dog complaints, in which owners can face fines and even jail time if they fail to quiet their animals. Animal Control has no plans to make those amendments at this time.
Predators, not city statutes, are chickens’ biggest threat. Most owners have lost birds to dogs, raccoons, and foxes that breached the bounds of a coop. Recently, Willcütt came home to find that a possum had a duck by the throat; he killed the beast with a pitchfork and saved the attacked fowl.
Of course some chickens will die at their masters’ hands, and views on this practice vary by owner. While some may balk at the idea of killing a creature they’ve named and nurtured, others raise birds expressly for meat. Britton Clouse, a vegetarian, makes the people who adopt her chickens promise not to eat the birds. Polston says she drew the line between considering her flock pets or food when a sick chicken incurred a $200 veterinary bill. The next time she couldn’t heal an ailing bird herself, she braced herself and broke its neck.
Hering recalls a day he and Vonk butchered a few dozen roosters in the basement of their home, a decidedly gory process. Hering wriggles like he’s having a seizure, flapping his arms, mimicking a just-decapitated chicken. “It’s disconcerting,” he says. “Plus, it’s messy.” But, like a hunter or fisherman, he has a no-nonsense attitude toward the practice. “We eat chicken; it might as well be ours,” he says. Willcütt, who does not eat his birds, has a more spiritual perspective for those who raise what they eat: “It’s one of the better things you can do for your karma,” he says.
It’s certainly possible to save money with home-raised meat and eggs, though for most of these chicken owners, reducing the grocery bill isn’t a motivating factor. Hering says he and Vonk spent a couple thousand dollars on two nice coops and jokes that they are eating $20 eggs. “We haven’t found ours to be very cheap yet,” he says.
A few days later, in the Clouses’ kitchen, Mary combines spaghetti with sauce in a stainless-steel bowl as Albert holds their family dog on his lap. One black cat is curled up under the table while another perches on a carpeted cat tower, licking a paw with a bright pink tongue. An occasional cry, “a-roo…cock-a-rooooo…ack-roo-a-rooo,” can be heard coming from the basement.
It’s probably Robert, a recent rescue described on Mary’s 180-person e-mail distribution list: “His coloration is very unusual—butterscotch, marzipan, and chocolate—he looks like a confection, appropriate for such a sweet disposition. Robert is a noisy eater and celebrates cooked eggs, spaghetti, cooked oatmeal, raisins, greens, and lots of scratch…He doesn’t object at all to being picked up and held and is a good listener.”
Mary picks up a Christmas card from among those displayed above the kitchen table. It reads, “With appreciation from the staff at Animal Control.” She shakes her head and sighs. While Mary says her interactions with city employees have been quite positive, she was deeply hurt by the proposed rooster ban, legislation that, as she puts it, “threatens a family member.”
Roosters as family? We indulge other pet owners who might use that term. Dogs and cats, in many ways, are easier to love—they’re cute, they’re furry, and they crave our affection—they’re the “popular crowd” of the animal world. But chickens? It takes a special heart to love such squawkers, a more meek and awkward species.
Mary heads downstairs to feed her flock. The birds putter about in large cages as she portions the spaghetti into feeding cups. The scraping sound of spoon against metal bowl causes Noel, a foster rooster, to belt out a screech that almost could be mistaken for the sound of a car accident.
Mary’s dedication to chickens is evident. When she’s talking about their needs, her voice gets soft and she chokes up a little, as if she’s about to cry. “Chickens are the most abused of all animals on the planet,” she says. They are excluded from animal-cruelty laws, humane-slaughter laws, and research.
Empathy for the lowliest creatures, Mary hopes, bodes wells for other disadvantaged animals and humans. “If you can get the world to care about chickens, everyone else benefits,” she says. “More kindness in the world is never a bad thing.”
Rachel Hutton is associate editor of Minnesota Monthly.
