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Backyard revolutionaries cluck for poultry rights
Posted: Feb. 24, 2004

by Jim Stingl

Madison - They call themselves the Chicken Underground, and they're living just beyond the law in their quest for city-fresh eggs.

These are regular folks in perfectly respectable Madison neighborhoods who just happen to keep chickens in their yards.

Power to the poultry, man.

I don't know anyone with chickens in Milwaukee, where it's illegal, although I do recall thousands of people often yelling "Cooooooop" at County Stadium some years back.

Owning a chicken in Madison is legal, but the Catch-22 is that possessing a coop is not. Hence the secrecy.

"Some people swap eggs for silence," said Madison Ald. Matt Sloan, who is proposing to change the ordinance to allow coops and up to four chickens per household.

Roosters, those early and noisy risers, would be banned. Beheading and slaughtering, which Sloan correctly considers incompatible with a residential area, also would be forbidden.

"It's probably not the most important issue I've ever taken on, but it's the most fun," the alderman said. "There are chickens all over this city."

Sloan said he's received many e-mails in reaction to his idea - all of them in favor.

This week I got a rare glimpse inside this shadowy society courtesy of Bryan Whiting, head of the Chicken Underground and a carpenter-contractor in real life. Whiting has no fear about revealing his name because he got busted two years ago and has since gotten rid of his homemade coop and his hens, which he purchased by mail as day-old chicks for about a buck each.

"There is a preponderance of poultry owners in this neighborhood," he said as we walked from his house in Madison's Bay Creek neighborhood to a child care center that has chickens in a handsome enclosure out back. When I admired his use of alliteration, his partner, Alicia Rheal, moaned: "Don't get him started."

The day care has two hens, a Rhode Island Red and a Leghorn. They clucked quietly and pecked away in their screened run.

"All the kids love to feed the chickens and collect the eggs," said the owner. I swore not to reveal her name to anyone not connected with the underground. I'll give you a hint: It's not Patty Hearst.

On average, each hen lays one egg almost every day. These champions of chicken in our state's capital like the idea of eating eggs from hens that get to walk around and breathe fresh air rather than the store-bought variety from chickens crammed into warehouses.

"There's a real movement in Madison to be closer to your food," Sloan said. "Lots of cities have laws allowing people to have chickens. Seattle does. So we're not breaking new ground here."

Our next stop was on the city's south edge, where I met a family who has three hens named Selena, Alpha and Freckles. They have no neighbors behind them, only woods and railroad tracks.

"I'm not supposed to, but I let them run free in the summer," confessed the woman of the house, an artist.

Back in the '70s when she lived in a back-to-the-land commune in Illinois, she and her fellow Mother Earth News readers had 40 chickens. Now her family relies on www.backyardchickens.com for advice on keeping the 'possums and neighborhood dogs away from the chickens and knowing what to do when one of the gals gets a prolapsed egg vent.

"What my husband would really like is a cow," she said.

Their 11-year-old daughter said the kids at school don't believe she really has urban chickens. "I tell them you can come over to my house," she said.

Hens are friendly, generous with their eggs, happy to eat table scraps, hardy in winter weather, quiet, and beautifully diverse in breed, coloring and feather styles. They produce less waste than a dog, and there's no smell if the owner keeps their area clean.

That's the Chicken Underground's pitch, and it's a good one. All these backyard revolutionaries are saying is give chickens a chance.

From the Feb. 25, 2004 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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