I went to visit some city chickens yesterday afternoon. Chickens! I have a fascination with chickens, but alas, it is not legal to keep them in Toronto. And even if it were legal, I do not have a backyard. Some people do keep chickens on a roof, but between the raccoons, possoms, my cat, and the neighbour’s cats, I don’t think it would be a happy life.
And watching these chickens I can see that they have a scratching behaviour that roof chickens would not be able to indulge in easily.
I learned something new about chickens yesterday that gave me pause for thought. Chickens eat plants! Yes, they eat insects. And yes, they eat weeds. But they are not discerning about either, which means that if you’ve got a chicken and a garden living together you can expect the chickens to take a bite or two (or several) from your prized plants. The chickens I visited were penned off into a very large roaming area (the largest I have seen for 3 chickens) and they had still managed to strip the leaves off of most of the foliage in that area within just a few short months! And that’s on top of their regular diet which includes lots of greens.
Good to know. Maybe I’ll shift my urban livestock dream to ducks.
