Fate of Resident’s Hens Rests With Dearborn Council
Dearborn’s city ordinance allows residents to keep cows, horses, pigs, goats, pigeons, fowl or other harmless domestic pets so long as the homeowner first obtains a permit from the city health officer.
At least that’s what is written into Part II, Section 4-1 in the city’s ordinance books. In reality, the process isn’t as black and white as Dearborn’s code of ordinances would seem to suggest.
Dearborn City Council must now decide whether or not to issue a permit for these hens.
Dearborn resident Syeda Akbari has been waiting since May 2009 for city leaders to make a decision on whether she can get back her 10 pet hens that she kept in her garage so she and her children could enjoy fresh eggs each morning. The city asked her to remove her hens from her garage last summer, apparently after a neighbor complained, one city official earlier told us.
Since then, she, well, has gotten nothing but the runaround. The city’s health officer has pushed her permit request to the city’s legal department and the city’s legal department has pushed the request to city council, drafting a paper telling our group of elected officials they would need to construct a new ordinance. But the council, at the direction of President Tom Tafelski, has decided to sit on the legal department’s paper, apparently hoping the chicken permit request would just go away. And that is where her request currently sits.
“I am feeling a bit frustrated,” said Akbari, whose hens are with a friend who lives nearly two hours away. “Why are they making this so complicated? I really love gardening and fresh vegetables and being able to have fresh eggs would be wonderful.”
Akbari is not alone in her love of fresh eggs from backyard pet poultry. Hens are popping up in the yards of urban homes in Michigan cities and across our country. Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti allow them. Lansing recently approved the same, allowing up to five hens in the city, and even Royal Oak permits residents to have backyard poultry.
Having hens has become the ultimate symbol in being “green” these days. Hens produce eggs, take care of kitchen leftovers and add manure to compost piles. Poultry also are great at controlling cockroaches, grubs, tomato horn worms or just about any other pest you don’t want in your yard or garden, according to poultry experts. There also is a website dedicated to urban chicken owners, aptly named www.urbanchickens.org
An article last fall in the Washington Post said this about urban residents and fowl: “raising backyard poultry has suddenly become as chic as growing your own vegetables. It’s all part of the back-to-the-land movement whose proponents want to save on grocery bills, take control of their food supply and reduce the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture.”
Dave Belanger, publisher of the magazine Backyard Poultry, says that chickens have become America’s cool new pet. When he launched his magazine more than three years ago, he told The Washington Post that he thought subscriptions would be between 15,000 to 20,000. The print run for his bimonthly is now more than 100,000.
The New Yorker magazine in its September 28, 2009 edition did a feature story about America’s renewed love affair with poultry using this headline: “The It Bird.”
“Chickens seem to be a perfect convergence of the economic, environmental, gastronomic, and emotional matters of the moment,” Susan Orlean wrote in The New Yorker. “In the past few years they have undergone an image rehabilitation so astounding that it should be studied by marketing consultants.”
Poultry, minus roosters, are hardy birds (quieter than some neighborhood backyard dogs at 5 a.m.) and can be kept year-round in a chicken coop, which is what Akbari says she did. In fact, her hens became a positive family project, with her husband building a coop for them last summer in their garage and her children feeding and gathering fresh eggs from her backyard birds.
“They are crazy about the hens, my boys,” said Akbari, who is willing to reduce the number of hens she had to just five if necessary. “It is a complete positive project. It can be positive for any family. It is the same hobby as someone gardening. My boys love it.”
Well, elected city council members, what’s it going to be? Does our city ordinance allow hens or not?