Are backyard chickens sustainable, or just stylish?
It must have been sometime in 1975 when my sister called from our grandmother’s place to say that the egg she had been working on in biology class at McGill had hatched. Whatever the bylaws governing backyard poultry on the West Island of Montreal at the time, we gleefully accepted the bird – Benjamin, as we called him – into the family. We kept him for several weeks, and a fascinating thing it was to watch him grow into a bantam-league pet. I still remember the blue plywood frame covered with fine wire mesh, the scent of sawdust, newspaper and chicken shit, and being curious about the fellow who adopted him after Benjamin became too large for us to keep in the house. Shift forward to today, and the whole notion of having a chicken in the family, whether a layer or a broiler – as I suspect Benjamin was – has become a politically charged topic. The promise of “a chicken in every pot” has long been shorthand for prosperity, but advocates of food security are calling for amendments to loc
