- A rooster by any other name…
Seattle wants urban farms, taller greenhouses, more chickens—even roosters. The City Council’s Regional Development and Sustainability Committee will hold a public hearing July 21 on proposed changes to the city’s current urban agriculture uses, including the creation of urban farms and community gardens.
Although the concept of urban farming has garnered a lot of support in Seattle, it has not been achieved under the city’s current land use code, said Andrea Petzel, a planner in the Seattle Department of Planning and Development (DPD) who is overseeing the project. “We have horticulture uses, but urban farms and community gardens are two new things,” Petzel said. The City Council asked the DPD to look at code barriers to urban agriculture as part of the Local Food Action Initiative passed in 2008. “We did not have the right definitions for some uses and a severe lack of places where food could be grown and sold,” Petzel said.
In spite of DPD having developed a whole fleet of radical changes, the part that has garnered the most excitement among Seattleites are urban chickens and roosters, Petzel said. DPD’s proposal would increase the number of chickens per household from five to eight. DPD also called for a ban on roosters, something Petzel said it thought would be in line with “best practices in other cities.”
But rooster lovers in Seattle complained, and a family even brought their pet rooster Birdie to a City Council meeting last month to boast about its positive traits. “We did not anticipate that kind of backlash,” Petzel said.
DPD’s rooster ban proposal will be removed. Council President Richard Conlin has introduced separate legislation which will allow roosters to remain in Seattle. “I am not sure whether I am ready to take the negative action of banning them when they are currently already permitted in the city,” Conlin said when reached by telephone. “I am concerned about the fact that there are some people who have them and what would they do if they were now banned—would the roosters be abandoned, would they be kept illegally? Whatever, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem appropriate to me to take away something that people currently have.” Conlin said he was considering a compromise which might grandfather existing roosters and not permit additional ones because “a lot of people” were disturbed by their crowing.
More after the jump
In 2009, 43 million U.S. households grew their own fruits, vegetables, berries and herbs, up 19 percent from 2008.
The main purpose behind small scale urban agriculture, Petzel said, is to encourage people to start growing their own food and build sustainable communities. (According to DPD, Between 12 to 20 percent of Seattle residents experience some degree of food insecurity. Approximately 63,000 Seattleites can be classified as food insecure and 31,500 as hungry).
Kathryn Jean Morris defended urban roosters on the DPD website, asking whether people preferred “the stench and roar of autos, trucks, and buses” to a rooster cock-a-doodle-dooing. “This is not Mexico, and we are not on vacation…” shot back another commenter, who complained about his neighborhood rooster waking him up early in the morning.
“Hopefully the whole meeting will not be about chickens and roosters, and we will be able to talk about other things as well,” said Petzel. Conlin stressed that roosters were a very minor part of the legislation even though it had received a lot of attention. “The real meat of the legislation is the various land use proposals that are going to make a huge difference in terms of being able to produce local food efficiently and effectively,” he said.
The proposal would allow urban farms of up to 4,000 square feet as an accessory use in residential areas without a permit. The food grown there could be sold on the site. Bigger farms would require a conditional use permit. There would be no size restrictions for farms in commercial zones. Rooftop farming and vertical gardening would be allowed in industrial zones. The proposal would also allow greenhouses used for food production to be built 15 feet taller than the permissible height limit in all zones except single family.
Noelani Alexander, who has been growing food in people’s backyards for local sale said the new policy would be a huge benefit. “It’s a little intimidating, even though the policy is we shouldn’t do it I am thinking who is going to enforce it,” she said of the current situation. Alexander is part of an urban farm operation called City Grow and Harvest Collective, a cooperative which sells the produce.
So far, she has developed five properties in Seattle which range between 500 to 1,500 square feet. One of her biggest gripes about farming in the city? Growing lettuce, leeks, potatoes and beets next to a driveway. “They get run over sometimes,” she said.
Roosters are loud, really god damn loud. They also don’t only make noise at dawn. In the summer they start up around 3am and go for hours. I know because I grew up with chickens and roosters. I am all for urban farmings but nobody should inflict a rooster upon their neighbors in a city. In the country it is kind of nice to hear the rooster because everything else is so quiet. In the city you need every bit of peace and quiet you can get.
“a family even brought their pet rooster Birdie to a City Council meeting last month to boast about her positive traits.”
Maybe her most positive trait was that she was a she and not a rooster at all?
Good catch, @2. 🙂
I’m in 100% agreement with @1. Roosters make a helluva racket at very inconvenient hours for city-dwellers. Plus, they’re absolutely unnecessary in terms of egg production (hens will lay regardless of the presence or absence of roosters). They should flat-out be banned in urban areas as noise nuisances.
I’ve heard that quail make for even better urban poultry than chickens: they’re cleaner, quieter, and better behaved, not to mention delicious. I wonder if the new rules will allow them?
I once grandfathered a rooster.
Roosters are fucking annoying, I raised chickens as a kid in North Seattle and my parents still have a couple. The rooster was constantly crowing and attacking us, so it went to the chopping block. I’m not sure how I feel about an outright ban, but I don’t think you should have roosters in an urban setting. In one batch of chicks we got two roosters, both of the breed we were all excited for because they lay blue eggs. So much for eggs… Those were “set free” in Bothell among a large colony of wild chickens.
I don’t see any problem with raising the chicken limit from five to eight, provided they have enough space for them.
In other chicken news, while biking home from work along Green Lake, I saw a guy among the sun bathers with two chickens in a little wire fence letting them scratch around in the grass. I guess they needed a field trip.
Roosters. Common in Spanish neighborhoods down here in LA. They are truly horrid. Imagine the worse barking dog problem you’ve ever imagined. Then imagine it worse.
In the movies, roosters always make the distinct “Cock-a-dodle-dooo” sound as the audio queue for the sunrise. As near as I can tell, that is pure fiction.
The sound I hear them make sounds like a cat being disemboweled. Sort of like “AAAIIIIIIIGHaahglch”, choked off at the end. It’s loud. And, as noted @1, it starts in the middle of the night and goes off every time you’re just about to fall asleep.
Editors: in light of these comments, please add “roosters” to “Enemies of Slog”.
@6,
I’d support a law that requires complaints from neighbors before a rooster can be forcibly removed from the premises. That protects roosters on any properties within city limits that don’t have close neighbors (if any such properties exist).
And it’s pretty fucking absurd to worry about potential abandonment of an animal that people like to eat.
I agree. When we were on Kaua’i, which has many thousands of feral chickens and roosters, dating from when Hurricane Iniki burst open all the chicken coops, living in every goddamn bush and gully on the island, and the roosters cack and caw and crow pretty much around the clock. @7’s description is pretty accurate. If my neighbor gets one I’m buying a pellet gun at Fred Meyer.
I forgot about the chickens in Kauai, they were certainly annoying! They do make noise pretty much constantly and it doesn’t simulate the idyllic setting of Old MacDonald’s Farm. It was slightly amusing as a visitor, but if I lived there I know I’d be going through a lot of .177 pellets.
@9, ungainly shoehorn you got there.
Live roosters have no place in a city environment.
@4: I believe the language refers to poultry, not specifically chickens, so I believe would also include ducks, geese, chickens, quails, pheasants, guinea fowl, etc… The conversation just tends to be about chickens because the are the most popular.
I just hope they pass this thing cuz there are a dozen eggs in my incubator right now that will be hatching later this month. Can’t wait to have 6 ladies flapping around the coop instead of just 3!!!
I hope someone with roosters moves in next to Conlin. Someone with roosters moved in next to me years ago, 12 roosters to be exact, an even dozen, and they crowed continually and competitively. They crowed at 3 AM, they crowed at 3 PM, and they got into fights which was even louder and definitely hit the decibel level for the noise ordinance. However, just try to get a cop out to listen to roosters crowing.
I have never had a problem with roosters, but maybe that’s because we’ve always had plenty of chickens for them to nail.
Agreed that roosters aren’t necessary for the vast majority of folks who just want chickens for eggs, maybe they should require a permit with sign-offs from neighbors.
And as it is now, you are only allowed 3 hens in the city, afaik. Increasing that to 8 would be awesome.
As for the urban farming initiative, will there be regulations regarding fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and the like? We don’t want to increase runoff pollution into the sound and Lk Washington.
There’s only one reason to have a rooster. They protect the flock. If you want to let your birds roam the yard (which will result in the best tasting eggs and meat), the rooster (and you don’t need more than one for about every 8-10 hens) is good added protection.
But that said, everything everyone says about them being loud is perfectly true. When I lived in Greenwood in the early 2000s, someone had one in the vicinity of Fremont and 97th, and you could hear it several blocks away.
Wow, @ 6, I wonder if the rooster I used to hear belonged to your parents. Were they anywhere near the intersection I mentioned @ 19? Or perhaps a little further south and/or west?
Every time I talk about muni code on chickens (specifically number of birds allowed) they always insist that roosters are not allowed, despite my arguments to the contrary. I have always sensed that most people just don’t want roosters, or think they’re illegal… which is why they aren’t around. They aren’t always so bad, but they can be. My vote is wait for a problem before you fix it.
Was it Waylon or Willie who blew the head off Ray Price’s rooster?
Cheers – Bruce in Blighty