The Hook

Disaster Waiting to Happen

This is a disaster waiting to happen. The noise and smell will be bad enough. However, the potential health and human toll from this whacko decision could lead to dire consequences should the avian flu virus start spreading through flocks throughout the city. What will the City do when that happens? Quarantine everyone in the entire city and kill every chicken? What if this happens during the Olympics?

I thought Andre Reimer had a good head on her shoulders, but, so far she's largely been focussed on allowing barnyard animals to be raised in the city and turning already-green lawns and parks into high-maintenance vegetable gardens that will need tons more water. This so-called "sustainable living" bullcrap is getting out of control!

Are these really the most pressing issues the City is dealing with today? All that's missing is for Ellen Woodsworth to bring forward a motion to make Vancouver a Billboard-Free Zone. Yes, because when the entire world's economy and financial stability are going down the toilet, what's on most people's minds are raising chickens, turning City Hall into a vegetable garden, and those ugly billboards.

The new City Council of Vancouver is worse than the last bunch, and yet somehow they get a free pass from the press and citizens. I'm sure the honeymoon will be over eventually.

I live in Victoria and I

I live in Victoria and I keep chickens here, as do many people. Most of the local governments in this region allow it. In my neighbourhood alone I know of eight backyard flocks.

Each year in May we have a tour of backyard chicken flocks.

My chickens are located about 2 metres from the sidewalk on mid range busy street and almost no one notices that they are there.

Chicken coops need not be smelly, it is quite easy to avoid.

Chickens are not noisy, roosters are noisy and the bylaws do not allow me to keep a rooster.

You can read about some of my experience with chickens here http://goodfoodca.blogspot.com/search/label/Chickens

As to health hazards, I am at more risk from illness through the school system than from anything else.

Ignorance is bliss...

Yeah, it's all bucolic bliss until the next H5 outbreak in the Fraser valley when the guys in the white space suits come around and wring Chikie Little's and Henny Penny's necks, traumatizing poor little Johnny and Brittany for life...

Chickens were never meant to be raised in battery farms. Humans were never meant to live in the human equivalent, or as we now politically-correctly call it - "ecodensity".

Any species forced to live in unnaturally confined spaces will serve as a germ factory; when multiple species live in confined spaces together, the risks multiply exponentially, because it gives those pesky bugs the opportunity to test all sorts of novel strategies for successfully propagating their kind.

When you have battery farms in the valley (germ factories), wild birds migrating hither and thither (distribution system), other unknown natural reservoirs (wholesale warehouses) and then humans and chickens crammed together in ecodense cities (the retail mall), you've pretty much created the perfect artificial ecosystem to facilitate and propagate a disaster.

Every major human plague has originated in situations where humans and other species coexisted in confined situations. Sure, sanitation is way better than 16th century London, but we still haven't figured out how to stop the transmission of the common cold.

We can't stop the wild birds or natural reservoirs, we still don't understand sanitation, and we're not going to be able to get rid of the battery farms until we're willing to pay the working poor the kind of living wage that will legitimize our weaning them off the KFC. The only things we can control are having strict biosecurity measures to keep humans and chickens separate until we are prepared to give up the battery farms altogether and/or get a better handle on sanitation.

This is pure, foolish sentimentality - I thought the Vision folks would have been a bit more intelligent than this. Don't they have public health advisers who can explain to them why this is materially different from promoting truly progressive changes like urban gardening, organics, 100-mile diets and bike paths?

I'm also surprised at how politically naive this is. It's a recipe for conflict (outside of Commercial Drive), whether in the densely-packed sections of East Van, or in the upscale West Side neighbourhoods where folks who forked out millions to show everyone their class and status are not going to take kindly to a chicken farm next door. And I can just see the tempers flying when the Vietnamese immigrant family next door decides that packing in twice the legal number of chickens in a backyard battery coop and letting them pretty much take care of themselves is a great moonlighting gig to supplement those measly $8/hour wages.

lost cause

well said, name!

I can just visualize a working stiff woken up very early on his day off, by the neighbours chicken farm.

At one time Richmond had many 4 acre lots owned by the veterans, where they in the beginning had a few farm animals, but inside a decade all you saw was the odd horse that refused to die, the rest was a wasteland!

I predict we shall see a multitude of half-hearted attempts at raising chickens in Vancouver and wittness the mess once they find it too much trouble!

We just know that cleaning up the mess will never happen, what a wonderful sight that will be looking out your backwindow.

A Chicken in Every Pot!

Once upon a night-time down a dimly lit back alley behind some dark houses all squeezed together, Wile E Coyote was out with his buddy looking for perhaps a kittie snack and they came across a wooden hutch with some good sized feathered birds that turned out to be quite tasty. "What is this?" said Wiley E to his buddy. "Not sure," said buddy between feather flying chomps, "... it kinda tastes like chicken". Chomp, chomp...

What ??

As mentioned above, what were they thinking?
Have any of these people raised animals? This isn't like having a dog or cat. Also, I like the comment about the use of water on "eco-friendly" gardens. I agree that some of these ideas have simply gone too far.

Keeps out those noisy kids

Especially if they're prone to asthma. What's the matter, a little bit of chicken poop getting up your nose? Got something against feathers?

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"Clinical Experience
IgE mediated reactions
Asthma, allergic rhinitis and allergic conjunctivitis may result following exposure to Chicken feathers, epithelial cells or droppings. The allergic manifestations may present as Bird Fancier´s Asthma and as Bird-Egg Syndrome, with symptoms such as rhinitis, urticaria and angioedema (2); and also as gastro-intestinal problems (3). Specific IgE has been found in patients exposed to Chicken feathers, and contact with Chicken has been reported as a common cause of occupational asthma and allergic rhinitis (8-11) (20).

Evidence of sensitisation to Chicken feathers is reported also in other studies. A Finnish study of 598 asthmatic children reported that 10% had specific IgE antibodies to Chicken feathers (7) .

Of 269 adult patients with suspected skin and respiratory allergies tested for feathers with skin-specific IgE tests, 9% of the whole group and 14% of those positive to inhalant allergens were positive to a feather allergen. Two reacted to Duck feathers, 12 to Goose and 15 to Chicken feathers. Symptoms were reported by 58% of feather skin-specific IgE-positive patients and by 55% of other skin-specific IgE-positive patients. Positive RAST-specific IgE test was surprisingly very low (20)."

http://www.immunocapinvitrosight.com/dia_templates/ImmunoCAP/Allergen____28503.aspx

Maybe it will just be a

Maybe it will just be a summer thing. Every Thanksgiving the City will close off some streets to traffic and have community chicken killing festivals. They could bring in some licensed moslem, hebrew, pujabi, chinese, etc., butchers to perform ritualistic mass slaughters in the traditional styles. Blood letting on a grand multi-cultural scale. Perhaps some races where one can gamble on the chicken than runs the farthest with it's head chopped off, all proceeds going to the community, of course. There could be feather plucking contests to sounds of fast plucking banjo players. Folksy barnyard songs will be sung. Big pots of giblets soup and Guinness Record sized lines of bar-b-cues and frying vats.

FREE Organic Omelettes Anyone?

The population of greater Jakarta is estimated at 23 million, making it the second largest urban area in the world. The rapid population growth has outgrown the government's ability to provide basic needs for its residents - many of whom do not have access to running water. Why this comparison? Maybe instead we should ask our neighbours in Victoria and West Vancouver, who have been raising chickens in their backyards for years, how they like their organic fresh omelettes?

Why the comparison...

Jakarta's socioeconomic challenges and cultural traditions must have made the decision to ban backyard poultry extraordinarily difficult politically.

But Indonesia is also at the epicentre of a long-simmering H5N1 crisis that they have not been able to wipe out and that continues to kill people, especially healthy young people.

The decision thus highlights how very worrisome are the concerns raised by bio-threats such as the latter, which we in Lotusland pooh-pooh despite the lesson from SARS that there are no borders and no comfort in being a "first world" country when it comes to these things.

There are no borders

...as 'Name' says, we should learn from that.

This from the Avian Influenza Pandemic Conference, December 6, 2005.

In addition to death and disability, pandemic flu shortens life spans among survivors by as much as 10 years.

The H5N1 virus will impact young and middle-aged healthy individuals far more than normal seasonal flu due to the severity of the inflammation or cytokine storm it induces in healthy lungs.

There will be very little warning.
There will be simultaneous outbreaks.
There will be a shortage of supplies of all types.
Facilities will be overwhelmed.
Health care workers et al will be at highest risk.
There will be widespread illness and a shortage of workers.
There may be more than one wave of infection.
All planning and response will have to be local. (You’re on your own.)
Critical attention must be paid to the legal, public health and socio-psychological aspects of the collection, identification and disposal of bodies.

"The Top Ten Things You Need to Know…

1. Avian flu is not necessarily pandemic flu. The development of a pandemic is dependent on the degree of pathogenicity in the virus.
2. We are globally interdependent.
3. Flu pandemics are recurring events; we are on the brink of one now.
4. When a pandemic arrives, there will be widespread illness and death,
5. Current medical supplies are inadequate or insufficient.
6. Economic and social disruption will occur.
7. We need to build “surge capacity” into our health care systems.
8. Education is critical and will generate trust and confidence in government, planners, medical care providers, etc. Such trust and confidence will emerge and sustain itself only if there is “transparency in communications”.
9. All planning must be local.
10. A rejuvenation of the public health system is required.

And a few morew things you need to know…

Infection occurs before symptoms present themselves.

Infected individuals remain contagious for 2-7 days (longer in children!).

There is scientific unanimity about the fact that we are overdue for such a pandemic.

The disease will spread rapidly and affect an entire nation pretty much at the same time. Thus the ability to call on outlying regions for support, supplies, manpower, etc. will not exist. We live in a Just-in-Time distribution economy, and this distribution chain will be affected by absenteeism etc.

Urban crowding drives up the attack rate of the disease.

Low socio-economic status also drives up the attack rate of the disease."