Has anyone been watching the programme Meet the Foxes, about London's urban foxes? The film showed a "family" of urban foxes in north London, and their various neighbours, including some who fed them and kept videos of them, and others who disliked them because of the noise they make - and the fact that they like chicken. Including their chickens.
One of the people on the film said he rather approved of the foxes who went for the chickens, because they'd be dealing with a major cause of noise pollution. For me, I'm more concerned about disease. It's well-known that flu pandemics tend to emerge out of east Asia because in that part of the world, people tend to keep farm animals close to their dwellings. Given that, by most accounts, mankind is overdue for another big flu pandemic, surely people should not be keeping chickens in their back gardens in cities?
Meet the Chickens
I'm of the opinion that a couple free-range chickens in the back yard don't constitute a public health issue. Backyard chickens got a bad rap during the Bird Flu epidemic. What I've read about that was that the epicenters of bird flu problems were not backyard or free range chickens but rather factory -scale chicken farms where birds are kept cramped, cooped up in close proximity to each other, fed artificial feed and jabbed with hormones, antibiotics and the rest. This is consistent with reports of bizarre health problems in steers on factory-scale beef farms, such as downer cows and so on. As far as standard influenzas having a farm animal origin, this is the first I'm hearing of it. I would buy the suggestion that poor sanitation may contribute to disease outbreak, but these are two separate issues.
I'll take a moment to hype organic halal animal rearing going on in your area, Yusuf. It's the wave of the future...
I'd rather people kept free range chickens than bought the factory farmed variety.
Amazingly, some people who describe themselves as vegetarians, or who don't touch red meat, eat chicken that has been produced like this. The treatment of chickens is far crueller than that of veal calves even.
And of course, meat from an animal or bird that is treated badly tastes of nothing.
As-Salaamu 'alaikum
I'm not sure how "free range" keeping chickens in an urban back garden is. And for the most part, they were not free anyway except when the owners were with them - they were kept in cages. Big cages, I'm sure, but cages all the same.
Anyway, I don't object to free range or organic chicken farming - I eat a lot of organic food myself. What I object to is the keeping of farm animals in back gardens in Stoke Newington (which is where this was - not Oxshott or some other semi-suburbanised village), for a number of reasons: the noise, the fact that there isn't room for the animals to run around, but above all, in the case of chickens *right now*, the risk of them becoming a link in the bird flu chain - particularly if lots of people decide to keep them.
Asalaamu alaikum, I have moved from opinionated Voice to Radical Muslim so please update your link if neccessary, and keep in touch too.