Chickens in town

When it comes to ordinances, few communities seek to reinvent the wheel. Most adopt ordinances based on the work done by others, with only minor modifications. That could be how Tower’s proposed new chicken ordinance came to include, among a number of humorous items, a prohibition on accumulated fecal matter in any chicken coop in the city.
These are chickens, remember. For those who don’t know, they poop over everything. It comes out wet and thick, in different colors, and in impressively large quantities 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our best guess is, a loose definition of “accumulated” is in order or there will be violations in every chicken coop in town.
It’s the same with the requirement that chickens be given access to clean water at all times. Yes, at all times. As previously noted, chickens poop everywhere, and their water dish seems to be one of their favorite destinations for said poop. We swear, chickens can turn a bowl of fresh water into a mudpie inside of ten minutes. How about an ordinance that requires providing chickens with clean water twice a day? After that, they’re on their own to keep it clean? Seems like the chickens should have at least some responsibility for their own care. Otherwise, it would take a full-time chicken maid to meet the new rules in Tower. We thought chicken maids were pretty much limited to California.
The proposed new ordinance, at least at present, also prohibits the “harvesting or butchering” of chickens, which seems remarkably overly protective for a place like Tower. This isn’t Santa Barbara, after all. People shoot and drag deer within the city limits of Tower during the annual special season and butchering of same takes place in half the garages in town come the regular firearms season. But as currently written, if you want to kill and butcher that rooster, you can’t do it in Tower. You’ll have to take it to Soudan to do the deed. They’re rough and tumble over there and can handle the occasional headless chicken flopping in the street.
And, of course, if you’re one of the latest residents to get chickens in Tower (we can’t say “one of the first,” since people have been keeping black market chickens in town for a while now), you’d better not bring them by the Timberjay office to show them off, or get their mugs in the next edition. The city’s new ordinance also prohibits anyone younger than five and older than 65 from coming in contact with chicks. Yep, didn’t see that one coming, either. With the youngest editor at the Timberjay currently clocking in at age 62, it’s probably best to keep any chickens well away from us. We’re frail old folks, according to the city of Tower, who might be felled by one of those chicken flus.
And before you even think of getting chickens in Tower, it would be best to go back to school for that engineering degree you’ve always dreamed about. The description of the construction of a code-compliant chicken coop looks like it was written by SEH. The coop should be elevated but not too high— it must not exceed seven feet from ground to roof peak. And you must have a minimum of four-square feet per chicken within a maximum coop size of 30 square feet, or six square feet per chicken. The coop must have also at least one square foot of window space, covered with half-inch hardware cloth for each 15 feet of floor space. It’s kind of like one of those word problems we all used to get in high school math.
The city is also naturally very concerned that their residents’ coops appear well-designed and aesthetically pleasing. All walls of the coop shall be built of the same materials, in one color, preferably a fashionable hue. No coops built of wood scraps, please.
Windows and trim are to be made of the same material, in one color. Roofing should also be of one color and preferably shingles or perhaps cedar shakes, which could look absolutely fabulous with the right accents. If you want to go with metal roofing, you’ll need special permission, which should go without saying.
And, finally, there is the city’s concern about snakes, which comes up more than once in this remarkable ordinance. Here in the North Country, we have garter snakes and the tiny, rarely seen red-bellied snake, which max out at about 12 inches long and don’t even have teeth. Neither poses a risk to chickens. If a garter snake ever found its way into a chicken coop, it would be the one in trouble. It would be lucky to escape the pecking hens and the accumulating fecal matter. Chickens can be a rough crowd, after all.