What You Need to Know about the Laws Keeping Chickens : laying chickens

The laws on keeping chickens vary, and should be considered, in this order:

First by city or town
Then by county (or geographical area)
Then by state (or province)
Then the Federal statute (or at the national level)

There are a few broad categories that each scale addresses and that are:

Your individual safety
The treatment and safety of the animals, i.e. chickens
The public’s safety

First and foremost, of course, is your personal safety. How are you keeping these chickens? Do you have the proper equipment, the proper housing equipment, equipment for monitoring? You’ll want to check with experienced chicken coop owners and operators before you begin with any somewhat larger chicken coop project of your own.

Where are you going to locate the coop? This is an important decision to make, as the location will have bearing on the laws that will apply to your coop. Are you in a commercially or residentially zoned area? Are you in a particular tax credit zone that requires specific things of the plat? You need to check with your city about a number of these issues.

How many chickens do you plan to roost and keep at this coop? The size will have legal implications, as depending on the number, you’ll be qualified and considered either an amateur hobbyist, an independent producer, or an industrial procedure. You should have a rough idea of how many you plan to take care of before you even begin to think about the location.

Also, you’ll want to figure out what it is you want of the chickens. Do you want to produce chicken meat? Are you raising chickens for their eggs? Or are you just looking for an awful lot of pets. Either way, you’ll have to incorporate your decisions here into a general sort of business plan about the coop.

Next is the issue of the chickens’ safety. Chickens all other animals have to be protected against diseases. By law, there is a bare minimum that you have to do to ensure the safety of the chickens, with the idea of not cruelly treating the animals, and at the same time, not producing a threat to public safety. An oft issue brought up about chicken coops is/are antibiotics. Antibiotics are used to control a wide host and variety of avian influenza, and other disease. Now it’s important to note at this point that there are extremely risks when it comes to influenza strains that can quickly become uncontrollable. It’s critical to act fast and report any suspicious diseases that you might encounter about your coop.

Antibiotics are used to stave off disease amongst the coop, but sometimes misused and exploited to artificially fatten up chickens with the objective to make a higher profit off the chickens, due to their artificially inflated weights. This is a poor reason to get into a coop project to begin with, because agencies such as the USDA are very strict about the treatment of chickens under these circumstances.

 

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