Chicken Law Redux

At the June Common Council meeting, the proposed law amending the city code to allow the "keeping and raising of chickens" was laid on the aldermen's desks.

At that meeting, Alderman Jane Trombley (First Ward) said that she wanted to go on record as having changed her mind about the chicken law. She acknowledged she had supported it "in the winter, when it seemed like a cool, quirky idea," but now, "with the enhanced understanding of disease transmission" brought on by the pandemic, she did not. She spoke of the "overall detriment to quality of life" and asserted "to further burden code enforcement is not appropriate." Alderman John Rosenthal (Fourth Ward) argued "the benefits [of backyard chickens] far outweigh risks of Hudson becoming ground zero for the next pandemic." Alderman Rebecca Wolff dismissed Trombley's concerns as "a superstitious connection and not something that should stand in the way."

Gossips again refers readers to an article that appeared in Bloomberg CityLab in 2018: "Have Backyard Chickens Gone Too Free-Range?" The thesis of the article is that urban poultry laws need to be stricter about public health and animal welfare. On the issue of public health, the article states:

Although urban poultry-keepers often believe that their birds, and eggs, are safer and more nutritious than products of commercial farms, many municipal regulations do not address sanitation, vaccination, or disease control. Indeed, urban poultry is linked to hundreds of salmonella cases each year in the United States. In Egypt, 70 percent of the people who came down with H5N1 bird flu in a 2015 outbreak reported exposure to backyard poultry.

The attention given to public health and animal welfare in the law being proposed by the Common Council is pretty much limited to this: "Chickens must be provided with adequate food, water and space, and all premises occupied or used by chickens shall be kept in a clean, sanitary condition."

The Council will not be voting to enact the proposed chicken law tonight, because it's the informal meeting, but they may be planning to do so next week, the regular monthly Council meeting on July 21.

To access tonight's informal Council meeting, click here. The meeting ID is 817 6249 4408; the password is 344882.
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