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Chicken Pickers

Citizens Debate In-Town Poultry

story and photos by Stina Sieg

Found in: | Inside | Politics |

After months of small-town drama, this was it. The letters to the editor, the planning commission meetings and that one animated, public hearing were in the past, and now Jen Sadoff and Sue Phillips had nothing to do but sit under the flourescent lights in Moab City Council's mostly empty chambers and listen as the council lay down a decree that had been months in the making.

With a judgment of 3-2, it was decided that, yes, chickens were, finally, legal within Moab city limits.
Some last-minute shifts had caused a change in the new ordinance that made the women mildly disappointed, but mostly the two chicken-owners looked relieved. They stepped out into the March evening and, in a cinematic moment, gave each other a high-five.
"We did it!" exclaimed Sadoff.
It was the first time in more than 50 years that chickens were legal in this remote, desert town. And while extraordinary to local fresh egg aficionados and sustainable food connoisseurs, the decision was also in no way unique. Across the country, far more than 100 towns and cities have declared the raising of chickens legit. Close to home, the Four Corners is a mish mash of spots where the birds are legal and where they aren't. Taos, N.M., Farmington, N.M., and Flagstaff, Ariz., all have rules outlawing chickens or limiting them to the point of impracticality. Ridgway, Cortez, Blanding, Santa Fe and all the towns within the Navajo Nation allow them. Historically, the issue seems to have been a quiet one, about which most people didn't make a fuss one way or another. These days, however, the pro-chicken movement is gaining speed - that's if towns like Moab are any indication. While most community members don't have strong feelings on the issue, or at least don't voice them, the ones who do are passionate and completely assured in their position. It's both sides that are bringing this minor revolution to the forefront of certain areas.
Sadoff, however, doesn't talk about trying to be a rebel. She simply wanted her chickens back. She never imagined they would be a problem as none other than Moab's mayor, Dave Sakrison, had given them to her. Originally a group of six birds, Sadoff had lost a few along the way, but the rest were hearty and lived a relatively charmed life scratching around the garden and lawn in her enclosed backyard. Her four-year-old daughter, Jaimin, was entranced by them, as was the family dog, Neo. The hens had their own pen and a bright, red coop in which to rest every night. Sadoff and her family ate the eggs, and in turn the chickens ate their backyard bugs. To Sadoff, it all seemed pretty unobtrusive and ordinary, perhaps a small step forward on the road to personal sustainability and raising one's own food. Mostly, though, it was simply a pleasure.
"We've always wanted to have chickens. Chickens just seemed so natural," she said.
And so it was until October 2008, when there was a complaint. Sadoff, who didn't know there was an ordinance that affected chickens, found herself in violation of it. Someone, she guesses a neighbor, had tipped off the city, and she was given two weeks to find her birds a new place to roost. She ended up taking them to a friend's house - a spot still within the city but not under such intense scrutiny - until she figured out how to right what she perceived as being a blatant wrong. Immediately, she began thinking beyond her own situation.
"I just wanted to change it," she explained. "I just wanted to make it easy for people."
She launched an information campaign and spoke with fellow chicken owners, some of whom had been cited, others who were still under the radar. She hooked up with Phillips, one of the poultry wranglers who had managed to go unnoticed, and they started doing research. If New York City and Chicago allowed chickens, then why not Moab, they asked. By November, they had submitted a first draft of what they hoped would become a new rule allowing the feathered creatures. By January, Jeff Reinhart, Moab's planning director, had fleshed their draft into a bona fide city ordinance proposal, ready begin the slow process of being enacted.
Even then, it wasn't the biggest issue in town, not the kind of thing that prompts people to stop, mid-aisle, in the grocery store and conduct political discussion. It might have stayed that way, too, if it weren't for longtime local John Hartley. His guest editorial in the Moab Times-Independent's February 12 issue was titled "Be careful what you wish for . . .." and challenged the fundamentals of the proposed ordinance. It got people talking as soon as it appeared on the newsstands. All of a sudden, this was the kind of deliciously heated debate that prompted many townies to take a side.
"No matter how innocuous, chickens are still farm animals," asserted Harley's essay. "Should we not ask, instead of insisting our neighbors and businesses, who invested inside Moab city limits, assuming zoning protection would remain in place, live next to farm animals with no input other than a public hearing?"
He went on to downplay the positive effects home-raised chickens might have on the environment and to detail the hardships of keeping such animals. Explaining that he had raised chickens as a kid, he blamed the birds for being cost-ineffective and an attractant for rodents. He ended the essay by suggesting that the city scrap the idea for a blanket ordinance and simply take residents' chicken proposals on a case-by-case basis.
"Ideas may be expanded but you can't put toothpaste back in the tube after you squeeze it out," he wrote.
Yes, the fight was definitely on.
On one end, there were the liberal-minded folks - the young families, the older bohemian types, the people living nearly off the grid - as well as those with a fervent sense of property rights. In the other corner there was a small, but vocal minority of residents afraid about what having chickens might signify, maybe that this would be the start of Moab going to seed, its home prices plunging and its atmosphere becoming even more rural. A day after Hartley's article ran, the public hearing was held on the matter, and about 35 people showed up to City Council chambers. The packed place had a frenzied, fun atmosphere and was so busy that some attendees had to stand in the back or sit out in the hall. One by one, mostly ordinance proponents came up to talk, and there was a building excitement with each new speaker.
Many of them were like Gary Shue, who wondered aloud what the big fuss was about.
"In my experience, I can't think of anything more benign in terms of community impact than chickens," he said.
Others, like Sadoff, addressed the ordinance as a bigger, environmental question.
"I think this is really a sustainability issue," she said.
Phillips, her partner in crime so-to-speak, declared the aesthetic of chickens and their coops as fitting in with "the hodge-podge that is Moab."
When Phillips's husband, Ron Georg, announced that, "We should be proud to have a little dirt under our fingernails," he did so to applause.
Hartley and his wife, Barbara Hicks, were just about the sole opposition to all this, and even though there was only two of them, their presence was enough to stir up the audience. They named their fears to the crowd, especially their concern over the notion of changing zoning laws. They also expressed a deep distrust of future chicken owners' abilities to raise their birds in a sanitary way.
"It's not the chickens I'm against. It's the people who probably aren't in this room," said Hicks, making a possible innuendo about a previous tenant of hers.
Immediately, a female voice from the back injected: "Actually, we're right here!"
That's pretty much how it went. People whispered behind opponents' backs and some even shouted out answers to rhetorical questions. If a local drama group hadn't just run a string of performances, it would have been the best theater the people of Moab had seen for a while.
Yet the excitement wasn't sustainable. At no other point did the issue ever reach the fever pitch that it had that night, and within a span of a month, it was put to bed entirely. First, the Planning Commission gave it a thumbs up, as did the City Council. Though the council voted to require permits, which Sadoff was against, they did decide that up to a dozen chickens could be kept, which she saw as an unexpected win. Swiftly, quietly, the whole thing was over.
Such controversies aren't always ended so easily, however. In many locales, such as Flagstaff, they simmer under the surface, never even getting a chance to be brought into the public eye. There, the city's chicken population is an open secret, one that lives in a constantly vulnerable state. Property owners like Dominic (who preferred not to give his last name) are able to raise their birds due to the grace of agreeable neighbors. Currently, he has ducks, though he has also had chickens in the past and plans to get them again. He and his wife love their "girls" (his words) and live with the fact that, at any moment, their fowl-raising ways could be stripped from them.
"But we like it so much, we just say �?�?�?�?Screw it,' and see what happens," he admitted, non-chalantly.
If confronted, he feels he's fully prepared to fight, to try to change the laws. He, like many of those enamored with raising chickens in Moab, is young, under 30, and has strong ideas about what he's doing. For him, this isn't a lark but part of a bigger picture.
In his words, "If gas goes to 20 dollars a gallon and food stops getting delivered, at least I have a source of protein growing in the backyard."
He likes knowing the origin of his food, and now he's hooked on the taste of fresh eggs. He dismissed the store bought variety with descriptions like "pallid," "flaccid" and "thin" and talked about his hens' orange, thick yolks with pride. He asserted that raising chickens isn't difficult.
"They should be in suburbia," he stressed. "They make sense. Especially with the tenuous situation with our food."
Even some of the officials in charge of enforcing the very kinds of rules that Dominic is violating don't seem so sold on them. Many, like an unidentified city worker in Dominic's home city of Flagstaff, have a more live-and-let-live attitude. As a government employee, if he observes chickens in violation of code or gets a complaint, of course he must act, he said, but otherwise, he's unworried about issue.
"I'm one of the few code enforcement people who thinks the government should stay out of your business," he said.
Lari Anne Pope, an animal control officer for the city of Cortez, a place where chickens are allowed, said that in her town, the birds are "here, there and everywhere." She doubts the majority of them are even up to code. Still, she doesn't usually call people on it unless the offense is egregious or she gets a complaint (she gets one or two a year, most of which she estimates are lodged by vindictive neighbors). Usually, the negative feedback concerns roosters and their noise, and hardly ever are concerns about waste or smell brought up. Personally, she doesn't have a problem with most of these minor violators, but professionally, she still has a job to do.
"As far as things are going with the economy, I think people should be raising chickens, and they should be raising a garden, and they should be canning everything they can," she said.
Still, some involved in chicken issues around the country don't believe things are that simple. Charles Ley, a code compliance supervisor in Flagstaff, worries that if chickens are allowed in the city, they might bring with them some unwanted guests, namely bears and other wild animals.
"Kind of the old theory of the fox is going to get in the hen house here," he said. "It's going to be schmorgasborg contained in a neat, little package."
Durango's Bryan Peterson agrees. As the director of Bear Smart Durango, it's his mission is to keep bears out of town, thus protecting them. Recently, when The Durango Herald ran an editorial stating that it couldn't list one good reason not to allow chickens in town, Peterson sprang into action. He could think of a big one.
"The whole key to a bear's diet is that it's easily obtained, high in nutrition and abundant," he said, explaining that chickens fit the bill quite nicely. Though he doesn't know if chickens themselves would lure bears into town, he's sure that at the very least, they would become a snack. With almost 30 bears being killed by people each year in the Durango area (mostly by cars and government officials enforcing policy), that's not a risk with which he's comfortable. Unless placed in fortified coops, he believes the less chickens there are, the better.
"I ran this past some of the bear people I deal with in other communities," he said, "and the general consensus was: �?�?�?�?Your town is nuts for considering this.'"
These sentiments make him probably the one Durango resident most vocally against the idea of allowing chickens, a hot issue right now, and that's something with which he seems quite comfortable.
Like many places, chickens were banned but tolerated mostly in town for years until city councilor Michael Rendon decided it was time to bring the subject to light. Originally, he couldn't imagine that a pro-backyard chicken proposal would be met with much, if any, resistance.
"I didn't think it would be a big issue," he said.
Immediately, however, things got more complicated than he had expected. Like most places where this question has been brought up, fellow councilors and citizens alike worried over flock size and cleanliness - but the most memorable concern raised was about wildlife. According to Rendon, Peterson and others started some truly thought-provoking and meaty debates. The general concern was that as people become more self-sufficient, the more food and animals they raise, which also makes their property more attractive to bears and other wild creatures. Both Rendon and Peterson feel that the basic question became: Does wildlife trump sustainability or does sustainability trump wildlife?
"Frankly, I've had better conversations on urban wildlife intersections than I've had in years," said Rendon.
Peterson concurred, unknowingly using almost the exact same words as Rendon. That unplanned congruency represents one of the funny and strikingly evident things about this chicken issue across the country. The controversy obviously goes beyond the birds themselves. Each side sees chickens as standing for something larger, something either frightening or exciting, depending upon the vantage point. According to Greg Hoch, Durango's director of planning, it will take months to solve Durango's chicken issue, regardless of what is decided. Even if an ordinance is approved, he thinks it likely won't be enacted until November or December, almost a full year after the idea was introduced. Surely, the peripheral issues that it has raised are far more immediate and will be around much longer than the hullabaloo over chickens. In that way, just maybe this isn't so much about hens as it is about the future. How do we want to plan for it? How do we want to live in it? What precedence do we want to set for it?
In Moab, as it must be in many places, the answers are subtle. Sadoff's chickens are back to clucking contentedly in her backyard, but only four other households have signed up for chicken permits, with another four having picked up the application and not returned them. At the same time, no anti-chicken letters have been received at the local paper for a long while and even Hartley, whose anti-chicken ordinance writings caused such a stir, doesn't have much of anything bad to say about the current state of things, chicken-wise.
There hasn't been some massive, cultural shift here, and some of the most impressive changes in the last few months have also been the smallest. It's not that people are staging pro-chicken rallies, but just maybe that some folks are changing their minds about the birds. Take Reinhart, for example, the planning director that created one of the first drafts of the chicken ordinance. He expressed surprise at how his feelings about the matter shifted, slowly, by delving deeply into it. He's not about to buy himself a clutch of chicks or go about town extolling the virtues of locally grown food, but he simply feels something positive toward backyard chickens now - while the idea gave him a twinge of negativity before.
During his studying, he kept calling towns that allow the birds and kept looking for some bad reports. He was waiting for horror stories or words of caution, yet whenever he asked a chicken-friendly municipality if it had experienced anything negative, officials responded with a resounding "absolutely not," he said.
It was eye-opening.
"The more research I did, I said, �?�?�?�?You know, this is not too bad,'" he explained, light-heartedly.
Oh, if only all sustainability and small-town political issues could be ended so neatly.

Moab writer STINA SIEG writes from the road, roosting where she wants.