Forgive the poor choice of words, I'm simply furious right now. This morning, I spoke with someone at our township office. She pulled up our property records, and muttered to herself, "Less than half an acre.... zoned as R3... the keeping of fowl is prohibited." What?! She then went on to say that we are "permitted 3 small animals", which "could include one chicken, one dog, and one cat". Ok... so I can't keep chickens, but I can keep ONE chicken?
First, let's address the numbers portion of this. One chicken would get rather lonely, unless it was a house pet, that is. I do not have any desire to place a diaper on a chicken, and I certainly don't want to devote 50% of my time to cleaning chicken poop off my floor, so that is not an option. Keeping a single chicken in an outdoor setting would actually be bad for it; lonely chickens tend to have bad attitudes, poor health, and generally don't do well.
And, does this mean that, if I had no other pets, I would be permitted to keep three chickens? Well, wouldn't that fall under the definition of the "keeping of fowl"? So where does that leave me? I have no idea.
I joined a forum this morning, devoted to the keeping of backyard flocks (http://www.backyardchickens.com/), and found references to the Michigan "Right to Farm Act". I have since read through this act, and it seems to provide protection for our situation, as long as we are selling at least a portion of the product that we produce -- obviously, in this case, eggs. I can't seem to make heads or tails of the actual legal-speak in the document, but one interpretation from the forum was that it doesn't matter if you have 100 acres, or 1/10th of an acre; if you place a sign out front, offering eggs for sale, that should be enough to satisfy the law. State law superseding local ordinances, this seems to be a second line of defense for our case.
I almost mentioned to the woman that it was ludicrous to hear that, while we aren't permitted to keep a few chickens, the people down the block have pigs... but I stopped myself in time. I don't know for a fact that those pigs are permitted, and I certainly don't want to cause trouble for someone who is obviously not causing problems for anyone else.
The other day, I spoke with the mother of one of my kids' friends, who also keeps chickens. She lives in the same township, and said that she was told a few years ago that they were permitted to have two. So, now that the nearest city has started to permit chickens, the rural township we live in doesn't allow it anymore? That makes no sense! But, I realized: perhaps her lot is larger than ours. Or maybe because it's in a different neighborhood, perhaps it's zoned differently. I pulled up township property records, and discovered: not only is their property under the exact same zoning as ours (R3, whatever that means), their lot is only .02 acres larger than ours. So there's absolutely no reason for this determination, in my opinion.
I know the right thing to do would be to begin taking steps to change this ordinance, or at least find out how/if I can get an exception. But I really don't know at this moment. I will update on this subject as warranted, but for now, I think I'm placing myself in a hold pattern; let the information sink in, and consider further steps.
If anyone knows of any sources of information, or has suggestions on how to dig up the information, feel free to let me know in a comment. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment