USA: Creature Feature: Coming Home to Roost

The practices of big agribusiness—and some irresponsible locals—may bring chickens into your shelter

Going against well-known advice, Mary Britton Clouse started counting her chickens before they hatched.

“We saw the chicken boom coming,” she says ruefully.

A few years back, a local community education center added courses on urban agriculture, and one of them focused on raising chickens in order to get their eggs.

“Half the curriculum was egg recipes,” Clouse says.

She’s not sure what the rest of the curriculum covered. If it was how to care for the birds, she thinks most of the class should have received Fs. “You wouldn’t believe the conditions that people who’ve taken this class are keeping their birds in,” she says....

Source: Creature Feature: Coming Home to Roost

Link: Chicken care
Link: Denny’s Super Bowl commercial unknowingly acknowledges suffering of hens
Link: Recommendations for municipal regulations of urban chickens