(07-14-2015, 12:20 PM)mpd618 Wrote:(07-14-2015, 11:37 AM)clasher Wrote: I don't think people should really be keeping chickens in the city. They are a lot of work and it makes for some really expensive eggs. ...
How is that at all relevant to whether people should be allowed to do so? That is the question - whether this should be something prohibited by by-law, or not.
People engage in all kinds of arguably "unproductive" activities - fixing up old cars, canning jams, growing vegetables. Sure, you can make claims that economically those things don't make sense. But it does not matter whether they make sense to an economist, it matters whether they make sense to the people doing them - and those people take into account things other than money.
Oh, and our endless suburban expanses are hardly so dense as to make the concept of backyard chickens ridiculous.
To quote the person the linked article "Wall said benefits include pest control, nutritious eggs from a known source, a reduced carbon footprint because they are made right at home and community awareness." that's why I brought it up. It's an ancillary point of discussion that people who support changing the by-law are constantly touting and I don't think it really supports the case since a bit of critical thinking would lead one to see that using a lot of extra resources for 4 birds isn't reducing anyone's carbon footprint at all.
I don't think keeping chickens should be allowed in city limits. Chicken manure smells disgusting and maybe 4 birds on a block won't cause problems but a few coops on a block would start to cause more odour issues. How many urban yards in KW have space that is 15m away from a neighbour? The endless suburban expanses might have room in some places but a lot of subdivisions seem tightly packed to me.
There are also by-laws about repairing cars to an extent; people can't run junkyards at home or keep cars up on blocks in the front yard. Fixing a car up in your garage is okay but running impact wrenches late at night isn't because that crap prevents reasonable enjoyment of other people's space. There's no by-laws preventing canning but you can't just start canning stuff at home and selling it since that would start to affect other people. I think that's the crux of this whole debate, a backyard chicken coop might not bother the owners much and they benefit from it but the smells and sounds drift over fence lines. These folks should just move to the country where one can engage in hobby farming without running afowl of existing bylaws.