There’s a movement afoot in Maine that folks in Wisconsin might want to keep an eye on, as reported today by NPR. It’s called food sovereignty, and it’s designed to protect the rights of farmers to sell directly to consumers without a license, whether that’s raw milk or home-slaughtered chickens.

One of the first local food sovereignty resolutions, passed in 2011 by the village of Blue Hill, was inspired in part by bureaucratic bumbling over chickens.

As NPR reported: Maine had passed a law that allowed small-scale poultry producers – those selling less than $1,000 per year – to slaughter the birds on their farms instead of at a slaughterhouse. The goal was to help more farmers get into the poultry game, but when state regulators wrote up rules for how the home slaughtering would work, they came up with a scheme that would cost a poultry farmer some $30,000 to $40,000 to implement.

You can read the whole story here.

Isn't this a beautiful chicken coop? It arrived Sunday from Jeff Jicinsky and it has already attracted lots of attention. We love having it in the coop garden at CLUCK the Chicken Store because it really shows how classy a chicken coop can be, but we're sure it would also look great in someone's back yard. It is sized for 4-6 birds, with removable roosts, three nest boxes and a large access door. And, unlike the coops you see on some of the online sites that are hardly big enough for a chicken to stand up in, this coop has both height and volume. The peak of the roof is about eight feet high.

But, unfortunately, some people still can't have chickens where they live. We talked to a young couple on Saturday who are organizing a pro-chicken group in Verona. Sorry, we didn't get their names or contact information, so we hope they will stop in the store so we can help put them in touch with other chickenistas in Verona. We also heard from people in Belleville that they are trying to get a new ordinance passed. Please get in touch with us if you know anything about that effort. We like to keep up to date on the legal landscape.

We love our backyard birds and frequently invite them to sit on our laps when we’re relaxing on the back porch, but we also have always thought that they have a little bit of Tyrannosaurus rex in them. They have that fierce, unblinking gaze and relentless prey drive that must have driven the smaller dinosaurs bonkers back in the Jurassic. And deep down, we know that, if we were the right size, they would have no problem gobbling us up!

So we were pleased to see that we’re not the only ones who think that way. We found this quote in a recent blog called 10 Fascinating Chicken Facts, by Leah Zerbe, online editor for Rodale.com.

“Chickens are dinosaurs. It’s not that they’re closely related—they are actual dinosaurs,” explains Ken Lacovara, PhD, associate professor of geology and paleontology at Drexel University. “One lineage of dinosaurs survived the mass extinction 65 million years ago, the birds. So every living bird, from a parakeet to a penguin, is literally a dinosaur.”

Leah goes on to write, OK, so all modern birds are technically dinosaurs.

“But of all modern birds, chickens are among the most ‘primitive’ or ‘dinosaurlike,’” paleontologist Matthew C. Lamanna, PhD, assistant curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, told me, noting that chickens and other familiar birds like geese and ducks belong to an evolutionary lineage known as Galloanserae. In fact, scientists have found at least one species belonging to this Galloanserae lineage—a ducklike bird from Antarctica called Vegavis iaai—in rocks that date to the Mesozoic Era, aka the Age of the Dinosaurs. “So, although today’s chicken species certainly didn’t evolve until much later, its lineage can be traced all the way back to the time of Tyrannosaurus rex,” Lamanna explains.

Her other 9 fascinating facts about chickens aren't nearly as dramatic, but it's a blog worth reading.

City councils and village boards all over the nation seem to be all a-cluck about whether to legalize backyard chickens. Some, like Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Paul, Green Bay, etc. etc. have welcomed chickens with no reports of ill effects. But others, like Verona, continue to reject hens in the city, often citing the usual suspects: noise, stink, vermin, and objections of the neighbors.

Sometimes the problem is simply the unshakable opposition of a council member who grew up on a farm and has vivid memories of cleaning up after 300 Leghorns. That's enough to scar anyone's opinion of chickens. But in other cases, people do raise legitimate questions. As the petitioners, it is up to us chicken advocates to present a strong case for our hobby and then to make sure our birds do not become the neighborhood version of Dennis the Menace.

This article on houzz.com offers some good advice about how to keep peace in the neighborhood before and after you install your coop. Of course, sharing fresh eggs with the neighbors also goes a long way toward making friends for hens.