One difference between city dwellers in bird flu afflicted areas like Indonesia and southeast asia and the US is that many of the former keep poultry as companion animals (aka, pets) or sources of protein (eggs, meat). But some people in the US think it sounds like a pretty good idea:
Last year, two parents living in the city of Madison, Wisconsin decided it was time to get their kids a pet. But they didn't want a cat. Not a dog, either. Not even a rabbit. They wanted a chicken. Twenty-five chickens, actually. All were shipped at one day old, and arrived in a tiny, cheeping package delivered by their mailman."A big part of our motivation came from our friends who had chickens in [their] backyard, and we saw them do it, and the eggs they got. We thought it was neat," says mom Elizabeth Arth. "We try to eat locally grown foods, and also, this is a way for our kids to understand where eggs come from." (The Scientist)
Like others in Madison, they ordered their new pets were sent from the hatchery by mail in boxes of 25, "so they can huddle together for warmth." Since a baby chick probably has a high surface area to volume ratio this is probably true, although it sounds kind of convenient for the hatchery. These also aren't garden variety chicks but designer chicks in unusual colors and patterns. And they are said to make fine pets:
Chickens also have gentle, inquisitive personalities when raised in small numbers, say owners. Arth's children, for instance, pick up the chickens and play with them. Dennis Harrison-Noonan, one of the earliest members of Mad City Chickens, says his chickens are quite affectionate, scrambling to sit on his lap and clucking around him looking for bugs when he gardens in his yard.
Sounds a lot like southeast asia and Indonesia, to me.
Arth's family is part of a growing trend of urbanites who keep chickens as pets in cities across the US, including Madison, Seattle, New York, and Austin, TX, according to Ron Kean, poultry extension specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Harrison-Noonan is a carpenter, and has been selling plans for home-made chicken coops for the past year, both nationally and internationally. He says he is now selling four times as many plans for coops than when he began a year ago. Madison itself has about 40 families with backyard chickens, according to Madison's city treasurer's office. This was illegal until 2004, when Madison began allowing ownership of small flocks in city-dwellers' backyards. Prior to that point, says Harrison-Noonan, there was the "chicken underground" ? scattered citizenry who secretly kept their birds.
Then there's this:
There is the issue of disease, but it's likely not much of a concern, says Karin Kanton, a veterinarian of exotic pets in Madison. All Madison poultry owners have to register their birds so the local government can keep track of them. "If there's a [serious] outbreak, you will lose all your birds, end of story," says Kanton, who keeps 32 free-range chickens and four ducks on her large property outside Madison. Most chicken owners keep their birds warm in the winter with a heated or wind-proof coop and a heated water dish.
Yeah, right. Oh, there's bird flu in a poultry farm near Madison? Sure, come on over and slaughter our beloved family pets. Our kids will be glad to hand them over. Hey, where's Bobby? Did he just run off with Tweetie Bird? Bobby! Bobby! Come back. The nice man from the Health Department wants to talk to Tweetie. Bobby?
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I grew up in an urban area and people used to keep chickens in their yards. Sometimes they were to eat and sometimes they were for pets. I know there were also a number of roosters and there were illegal cockfights in the complex next door.
We lived in a house with chickens one summer. The chickens would come running to the gate as soon as we got home and follow us around like dogs. Lots of people in my Seattle neighborhood have them and I would have some now, if I thought we (as in family) had time to take care of them, and if I had sufficient fencing around my garden.
Chickens wreak havoc on sugar peas and other vegetables.
Happens right in my town; just have one per family member and they are "pets", not noticed as a zoning problem.
Normally, I think locally-sourced food is good, preserving genetic diversity in poultry breeds is good (backyard folks keep breeds alive mega-farms don't find "profitable"),
but no one is telling the public that H5N1 was already in the continental US, in wild waterfowl, (whatever other animals aren't being tested and reported) and strict biosecurity (and the March 2006 FAO Recommendations for dog and cat owners and others http://www.fao.org/AG/AGAINFO/SUBJECTS/en/health/diseases-cards/avian_c… vets should have been distributing)
need to be being followed now. Changing habits takes time and interest.
Municipalities could also be testing their playing fields for H5N1, since children spend so much time there. American public needs to be told why they should start practicing infection control and stocking pandemic pantries now. (Skip the "Chicken Nuggets To-Go at the grocery store though; "50% off!" -maybe someone got a deal on that melamine-fed chicken the FDA decided not to hold up? (Or has the US started that insane chicken export/import deal with China already? Talk about "playing chicken"...)
A lot of those house chickens, I hear, are adopted on the last day of grade school, when the teacher's emptying out the classroom that will be locked up for the summer.
There's this unit where they get an incubator and some fertile eggs, during the winter.
The safety of the food supply recently has me rethinking poultry in the back yard, despite my fears of a pandemic.
Which devil do you choose?
Keep chickens. Be reasonable about hygiene, don't let them have the run of the place, they need their own space and it should be separate, ie, their space. If we live closer to our animals and treat them more like living beings than like living cogs in a big machine, they wouldn't be such a health threat. We've been doing it for 10,000 years. The danger comes, not from your backyard chickens but from the 100,000s of the poor beasts crammed into those buildings outside of town. NOt only does highly pathogenic disease come from there but the food products they make are killing us with cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
I live on a farm. Our pond usually has upwards of several hundred wild Canadian geese on it and the barn rafters have dozens of different kinds of birds' nests.
In addition to all the livestock, we have about a dozen roosters. We have no hens and dont eat them, so I guess they count as pets. They live in the barn or sleep in the trees and either find their own bugs and grubs or snatch some of the cats' and dogs' free choice food. I've noticed that the tick population has definitely gone down. I AM worried about Lyme disease. Our woods have plenty of deer and mice.
Every year, my sister who is a 4H leader brings me a cageful of crossbred roosters left over from the 4H sale. We cant stand seeing the little kids crying when their birds dont sell and Daddy plans to take the bird home for dinner. All of these birds have been pets - handraised and tame. Some of them have gone on to friends who needed a quality rooster for their flock, others (the stupid ones) fed the local vixen's brood.
I really like the chickens and I'd be thrilled to have hens, but we dont eat enough eggs to make it cost effective (laying mash is expensive) and the typical rooster doesnt fight if there arent any wimmen around.
With the HUGE non-migratory geese population here (which I rarely hear mentioned), and cats and dogs being H5N1 hosts, too, what difference does a dozen free range chickens make?
SaddleTramp
I'm not about to keep backyard chickens, but I can certainly understand why people would. It's like Worried says, there are dangers in any course you take these days, from carnivorism to veganism, and yet we have to eat. And like the people in the article say, there are intangible benefits in raising/growing some of your own food, as well as tangible ones (food miles, for example).
And as you yourself have pointed out, Revere, dogs and cats are potential H5N1 hosts as well, and we'd raise blue hell if someone tried to "cull" them. Is there the potential for heartbreak here? Sure.
But I don't think the answer is turning all our meat/eggs production over to giant companies whose production methods certainly lead to unhealthy animals and probably foster the emergence of new/worse disease.
Personally, I've started buying more locally produced food. It'd be very hard to do so exclusively, but it's pretty easy to do sometimes (at least in my neck of the woods). It's a nice feeling, knowing I could drive to the farm where my milk comes from, and see the cows grazing in the field. And it doesn't require me to start raising my own livestock. *g*
I'm not speaking out against chickens as companion animals. I'm pointing out that the many people who find it so strange that they do this in southeast asia and elswhere might take a look, literally, in their own (or neighbors') backyards. There is nothing particularly strange about it. And when push comes to shove, they may find themselves in the same conflicted position as those elsewhere whom we censure for not killing their pets when there is bird flu 1 km away.
The thing that seems to have been left unsaid (except tangentially by Ron) is that every year, around Easter (when it is popular to give cute little yellow chicks as pets) the Salmonella rate goes up, especially in kids. Salmonella factories, whether chickens, turtles, iguanas or snakes do not make good pets for kids.
This post made me think of other "outdoor" pet birds people keep, which is less uncommon than keeping chickens. I know an awful lot of people who keep pigeons, for instance. (I'll have to ask my boyfriend, whose family has kept pigeons for years, what he thinks they'd do if there were H5N1 circulating in the local bird population and there was a cull order.)
Incidentally, Galen, those birds are called "Canada" geese, not "Canadian" geese, unless they are actually some geese from Canada. The usual sort of Canada goose was named after some guy whose last name was "Canada." (What a cool last name, says the Canadian in the crowd...)
Don't know where their pigeons are, (have they read the FAO Report?)
but, the continental US has "low-pathogenic" H5N1 already:
http://wildlifedisease.nbii.gov/ai/LPAI-Table.jsp
Last time New Castle disease hit California, I seem to remember an estimate of something like 450,000 backyard chickens in LA & Riverside counties. Not to mention San Diego and parts of Orange County. Like a very large, decentralized farm, minus some risks, but also missing some of the protections.
TEJ: Yikes. Despite the fact that LA and Riverside Counties are bigger in population than most countries in the world, that's a shitload of backyard chickens. I am stunned.
I love this blog - I always learn something new. Thanks Interrobang for the info on the Canada geese. I also totally misinterpreted that revere was commenting on our lack of empathy with Asian chicken owners. Goes to show that limited perspective is everything.
In any case, when TSHTF, I'd be surprised if we find out early enough from TPTB for anyone to go out and cull anything. They'll keep that info under wraps until it is way past "soon enough" to do any good.
And another thing - I dimly recall that when H5N1 hit Europe last year that a lot of people (developed country, access to health care, yadayada) dumped their pet birds (cages and all), their cats and some dogs at the local pounds, dumps, or just plain turned them loose to fend for themselves. The animal welfare people were swamped with trying to rescue the poor creatures.
Going house to house to cull pets might not be the biggest problem after all.
SaddleTramp
Reality v effect measure
http://www.motherearthnews.com/article.aspx?id=114666
Here's what's going on.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/article.aspx?id=114666
Today, animal products produced outside of factory farming, or, in other words, without cruelty, cost about twice as much. How may of you are willing to pay a little extra for safer and more humane food?
kparcell: I'm aware of this controversey and haven't taken a position on it so it isn't "versus" us at all. I have inveighed against factory farms on a number of occasions, although I realize not to your satisfaction. But I did become a vegetarian for a couple of years out of dismay over the giant industrial killing machine we call a US meatpacking company. So I'm not as unsympathetic as you seem to think.