Good cluck so far: Longmont’s backyard chickens thriving

By Cindy Sutter and Maya Gurarie
Longmont Ledger

After he gets out of school, 5-year-old Leif Wegener likes to come home and feed vegetable sprouts to his family’s four chickens.

Leif Wagener of Longmont holds one of his family's four hens. His mother says the chickens teach him about where his food comes from and the cycle of life. Cliff Grassmick photo

His mother, Melissa Held, says she and her husband were eager to raise chickens, after Longmont issued permits to allow the practice last year. She and her husband, who grew up on a homestead, saw raising chickens as a logical extension of growing their own vegetables.

“My husband and I are avid gardeners,” Held says. “We have a huge garden, many beds. This is the most barnyard animal we could get in the city limits.”

While no national statistics on urban chicken raising exist, enough cities have taken a look at changing their ordinances to allow chickens that the ABA Journal ran an article in July to alert its lawyer members that city ordinances that dealt with poultry had unexpectedly become a hot area of the law.

Longmont changed its law last year to allow some homeowners to raise chickens, issuing 72 permits to keep chickens last February. In September, city planners will make a recommendation about increasing or decreasing the number of chicken permits. Fourteen people are currently waiting for permits. Thus far, Longmont has had few problems with its new chickens.

Animal control officer for the city of Longmont Robin Breffle hasn’t received many calls about chickens in the last six months. She received more calls after the ordinance passed last year, but matters have settled down.
“The ones that have permits are taking good care of their chickens,” Breffle said, who has worked as an animal control officer for 20 years.

“I think all the fears people had didn’t transpire,” said planner for the city of Longmont Ben Ortiz. For example, “That animal control would have to do a lot more work. I don’t think that it has.”

Longmont resident Chris Branigan feeds chickens in her yard. Branigan is one of 72 residents granted a permit to raise chickens. Maya Gurarie photo

Many of the new chicken owners are like Held, looking for untainted food and a closer relationship with where their food comes from for themselves and their children.

“For a person very interested in being connected to the land, growing their own food and making compost, chickens are a part of that cycle,” she says, adding that they’re quirky and fun to have around.

However, the increased interest in urban chickens has drawn fire in other parts of the country. Farm Sanctuary, a national coalition of farm animal rescue groups based in New York, issued a statement last month urging cities to reconsider changing anti-chicken ordinances. The group decries what it says are inhumane conditions in hatcheries, where birds may be deprived of food and water for extended periods. The group also says its members are seeing a surge in unwanted chickens, particularly roosters, which are not allowed in most cities.

Most male chicks are killed at the hatchery, since too many roosters are undesirable even on farms. However sexing chickens, the term for determining the young chicks’ gender, is an inexact science, meaning that some urban chicken raisers may find themselves with an illegal rooster in the coop.

Local blogs list a few farms willing to take roosters and chickens. But calls to a couple on the list showed that at least two farms are no longer accepting roosters.

“We’ve had a few people call, and usually roosters is what they’re trying to get rid of,” says Mark Guttridge of Ollin Farms in Longmont. ” We have decided not to accept any more roosters. Sometimes I wonder what happened to the ones we turned down.”

But there doesn’t seem to be a flood of calls to place unwanted roosters, and local farmers say the number of calls has not increased since Longmont began allowing chickens.

Bren Frisch of Sunflower Farm in Longmont says the farm gets calls about unwanted chickens in the range of 10 or so a year.

“Usually people call because they lose interest (in raising them),” she says.

Devra Maxwell, animal care supervisor at the Longmont Humane Society, says the shelter occasionally receives chickens or roosters, which it seeks to place at local rescue facilities.

“They’re hard to deal with,” she says . “We don’t have the space, the food or the resources to properly take care of them.”

While local blogs say donating unwanted chicken and roosters to raptor rehabilitation facilities is also an option, Heidi Bucknam, animal care director of Birds of Prey in Broomfield, says the facility rarely accepts chickens.

“We do get requests from people who want to give them to us,” she says. “(But) you don’t want start a raptor thinking that chicken is a good meal.”

Maxine Mager, owner of Creative Acres, a no-kill animal sanctuary in Brighton that houses 400 animals of 100 different species, says she noticed an uptick in calls about chickens and roosters four or five years ago when urban chicken raising started to get popular.

She understands the appeal of urban chicken raising, but says it can be problematic.

“That’s the irresponsiblity of the city. If they’re not going to allow people to keep roosters, don’t keep anything,” she says. “No one is getting (roosters) like we are. Other groups don’t have the room.”