On CBC there was just a little newsmagazine segment about people raising chickens in town. (I live far enough north I get the Ceeb better than PBS on my rabbit-ears.) There was the usual back-and-forth, and the idea was mooted that an increase in townie livestock would mean a decrease in factory livestock, meaning a decrease in catastrophic disease outbreak, less antibiotics needed, and so on. (The show wasn’t quite so in-depth. Newsmagazine, remember?) There was also the idea that chickens attract rats, raccoons, and possums, meaning rabies, plague fleas, and rabies is damn scary.
Keep in mind that a statistically significant number of people, many of whom live in towns, refuse to get vaccinated. Educating them is futile because education depends on the rationality of the educated.
So, is a decrease in potentially catastrophic disease outbreaks worth an uptick in localized rabies outbreaks? We can predicate this by saying that vaccination should be universal, but it won’t be because sanity isn’t universal and anti-vaccinationism is a common madness these days. So more livestock near humans means more vermin mammals close to humans, which means more rabies in and around humans.
(Other diseases would have an increase as well. Rabies is damn scary.)
The saving grace is that the outbreaks would likely be localized: A few families would get sick and get treated, the rabid animals would be killed, and everything would be over. This isn’t like a ton of peanuts becoming contaminated because a single factory was a little slice of the Middle Ages.
(And a final silver lining might be that anti-vaccinationism is killed off by a few babies dying of rabies. It’s hard to take a hard line against something that will save your child from something your neighbor’s child died of.)
Well, in Canada there’s at least one family that raises chickens as pets. No accounting for taste or complete and total lack thereof, even to the point of mental disorder.
That was true in the 1930s and the 1950s. Then the 1960s happened. ‘Natural’, ‘Organic’, and ‘Unprocessed’ became something between holy mantras and commercial industries, with admixtures of fad and pseudoscience thrown in for flavor.
The upshot is that Whole [del]Paycheck[/del] Foods can charge more for food that’s had less done to it, out to the case of charging a whole hell of a lot for completely unprocessed food, and Missoula (San Francisco in Montana) recently passed an ordinance allowing people to raise poultry within the city limits.
I lived in Takoma Park, Maryland which is a suburb of DC. One of my neighbors kept chickens and more importantly for me, when I was trying to sleep in, a rooster. I moved into the District to be able to get some sleep.
You really don’t understand anything about rabies, do you?
For one thing, almost nobody needs pre-exposure rabies vaccines–vets, and animal control officers, and that’s about it. Hell, most of the people working in vet clinics have never had the pre-exposure vaccine, because they can’t afford it. If you’re really lucky, you can get it heavily subsidized by the health department and your clinic, and it’ll only cost you $500 out of pocket, but those opportunities are few and far between. Once vaccinated, you have to have blood titers pulled every 5 years to make sure you’re still protected, and the titers are bleeding expensive, too.
For another thing, rabies is only going to spread within a family if they’re all bitten/scratched by a rabid animal, or if they’re biting/scratching each other while infectious. And those people wouldn’t get treated after they got sick–they’d get dead. Only one person in known medical history has ever recovered from rabies after breaking with symptoms. One.
For one last thing, killing the rabid animals is harder than it sounds, because you have to find the damn things. This can be very problematic when you’re talking about wildlife that wasn’t captured or killed at the time of the attack–you’re looking for one bat/raccoon/skunk out of Og knows how many, and the only way to know for sure if you have the right one is to capture and kill as many as possible, cut off all the heads, send them to the state lab, and keep doing that until you get a positive test back. And that’s no guarantee that was only one.
Even where it is legal to keep poultry within city limits, it is usually illegal to keep a rooster. Even where it is legal to keep a rooster, there are laws against keeping animals in general which are noisy/disruptive.
Cities attract rats, raccoons, and 'possums. And I imagine that urban farmers will secure their livestock better than most people secure their garbage cans, which is where the opportunistic varmints get most of their food now.
There seems to be a wave towards urban poultry right around now… Cleveland just allowed them, too. Amusingly, the measure was pushed by the downtown councilman, who’s surprisingly agriculturally-minded (the city also has a “garden” zoning, in addition to the usual residential, commercial, etc.).
madmonk28: You wouldn’t be Joe Doakes, would you? Interesting data point. I don’t guess there were disease outbreaks, were there?
A CrazyCatLady is just the person to educate me about rabies, which I apparently know next to nothing about. I thank her and will be very afraid for a while.
Chronos: Good point. I’ve never actually lived in a sizeable city (I’ve lived just outside somewhat middling-sized cities, where you expect raccoons and such) and so I didn’t know there were still vermin populations in them.
I don’t know of any disease outbreaks in Takoma Park, but since there is a statue in the town to a chicken that was hit by a car, I knew better than to complain to any authorities about the noise.
In the 1940s, of course, we had meat rationing - so people in all kinds of places raised chickens. My grandparents did, right in (a small) town, with varmint control provided by small boys like my dad, with .22s.
How, pray tell, is that different than “rats, raccoons, possums” etc. being attracted to the food ('cause that’s what you’re really talking about here) of cats and dogs and ferrets and parrots and all those other pets/livestock that already exist within city limits.
For that matter, human food and rubbish has the same effect.
Frankly, between my husband getting attached to easily to animals, and the sheer amount of work involved in raising livestock, slaughtering, and butchering I’d just as soon pay someone else to raise and kill the beasties. Or I’d take up hunting. It’s still a lot of work killing and butchering, but at least I wouldn’t have to bother with the feeding and raising of the livestock.
Aside from aroma, the point about chicken waste isn’t irrelevant. If you’re set up to compost and use it, great (beacuse it’s really good for that), but if you’re going to have to regard it as an item to be disposed of, it’s an additional drain on urban resources.
Derleth, don’t be afraid. Rabies is, quite not that big a deal. I mean, it’s a big deal if you get it, but that’s really exceedingly unlikely. I’ve sent off a couple dozen heads for rabies testing in the last 10 years because the animal was showing neurological symptoms, and none of them has ever come up positive. Damn good thing, too, since I’d been handling all of them before death, and I’m unvaccinated. (I didn’t have the $500 bucks when I had the chance for subsidized shots, and I don’t work often enough to justify the $2000 it would cost me now. Call me illogical.)
Don’t play with wildlife, which you shouldn’t be doing anyway because they can carry zoonotic (transmissable from animals to humans) parasites. Don’t interact with animals that are behaving oddly or aggressively, wild or domestic. Especially don’t interact with wildlife that is acting oddly. And if someone brings you an unvaccinated animal that has old bite wounds and is twitching and acting oddly, do NOT touch it without gloves.
There, you’ve already cut your risk of needing post-exposure rabies shots by 99%. Breathe easy.
Forgetting all the noise, nusaince and health issues, how would you go about getting people to do this? A government issued mandate forcing people to keep chicken coops in their appartments? Why on earth would cityfolk raise livestock? And where the hell am I supposed to keep them in my 600 sq ft appartment?
This is one of those many instances where the free market works pretty well. Large factory farms out in the rural areas can raise livestock much cheaper and more efficiently than lots of little individual city farms.
