My Pet Chicken Blog

Does Coronavirus have you thinking about producing your own food? Sweet. But take a sec and think this through, please… Yesterday I was chatting with a good friend who works at our local feed and seed store. They’ve been swamped with customers clearing out seed packs, buying up gardening supplies, and scooping up hens. That’s […]

Do you live in a town you wish would stop stomping on backyard chickens? Have you tried to legalize chickens and failed? Does your town council or zoning commission seem to want to control your every move? Do they force you to pay for a permit for the privilege of raising a few hens? In […]

As detailed in my last post, Cock of the Walk: When a Rooster isn’t a Rooster, many local chicken ordinances outlaw roosters, and most chickeneers are happy to comply. It is a small sacrifice to make. What about those parts of the country, like Baltimore County where I live, that have laws that restrict or […]

On Facebook yesterday, we shared a story from Michigan. Michigan residents have just lost their Right to Farm protections. There was a variety of response to this distressing news.With the responses were a few misconceptions. For instance, some were panicked, seemingly under the mistaken impression that backyard chickens have been expressly outlawed. That’s not the […]

The first part of this blog series on how to work toward legalizing backyard pet chickens in your area can be found here. The second “legalize chickens” post can be found here. By now, you’ve done some research so you know what the laws are, who can change them, and you have a proposal to […]

Last week I posted Part 1 of the “Legalize Chickens DIY” series. This is the second post in the series. If you read last week’s post, by now you’ve done some research. You know what the laws are in your area, you know who can change those laws, and you know whether or not they […]

We’ve received a lot of questions over the years about how people interested in keeping chickens can legalize chickens in their area. The typical arguments against keeping small flocks of backyard hens are silly, to say the least. They’re so silly, I wrote a blog post about  the 6 silliest arguments against keeping backyard chickens, […]

Our blog at My Pet Chicken has made many posts and references about the social misconceptions associated with keeping a backyard flock. Such as Lissa’s post: Do chickens make you look poor? Yet, the humble chicken always finds its way back into our backyards and hearts.  When I read this essay by E.B. White—“The Hen: […]

Chickens and dogs: they don’t naturally get along. A reader writes to “Listen Lissa,” asking how to handle the loss of her chickens to a neighbor’s dogs: My neighbors’ dog gets out of their house a lot. Twice he got into my enclosed chicken yard and has now killed half of my hens. How do […]

If you have a microflock—meaning an exceptionally small flock of three to five hens—you have to be selective with your breed choices if you want to be able to gather enough eggs to supply your family. Some towns tightly restricts on the number of hens you can keep to just three or five, so you […]