By Bill Phillips

Our chickens were the definition of free range.

They spent their days foraging in the barnyard. We had about 30 or 40 layers and they pretty much had the run of the place.

I don’t ever remember bears being a problem for the chickens, although they had an actual coop to retire to where it was relatively safe. Coyotes, the neighbours dogs, and my father’s axe in the fall were the biggest threats to our chickens.

Bears, not so much. Preferring veal over chicken nuggets, the bears in our neighbourhood were more of a threat to the calves than they were to the chickens. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t acquiesce to poultry if the occasion arose, I’m sure.

The chicken coop was basically a small barn where the chickens went to roost. My father built nifty nesting spots for them to lay their eggs. The chickens accessed them from one side and we could open a small door on the other side of each nest to look for eggs in the morning without having to disturb the chickens too much.

My mother did a lot of baking and with five us in the house, I’m sure we gobbled up all the eggs our old hens could produce.

We might have sold a few dozen here and there, but along with a huge produce garden, the chicken slaughter and the slaughter of Ol’ Bessie for beef, it was how we got most of our food.

We didn’t do it because it was fashionable or because we had some romantic notion about ‘organic’ living or because we were ‘back to the earthers.’ It was just how we fed ourselves.

So when I heard this week about the group Poultry for PG pushing for council to allow city residents to keep a few chickens in the backyard, how could I not support the idea?

Nothing beats fresh eggs, still warm from the hen that laid it (except maybe for warm milk fresh from the cow … unpasteurized, I know, but that’s another story).

There’s nothing wrong with allowing people to keep a few cluckers in their backyard. But it has to be done right and I think the proposals coming from Poultry for PG’s Laura Lawrence are the right ones. The suggestion is no more than six chickens and no roosters, they’re the noisy ones.

The pens have to be not only chicken proof, but fox-proof, dog-proof, coyote proof, cat-proof, eagle-proof and yes, even bear-proof. Anyone who has kept chickens will tell you that any number of predators will make a meal out of your chickens and those predators will dig holes, climb tall trees, and scale the most treacherous landscapes just for some good old chicken a la king.

Plus, as the Northern Bear Awareness Society has pointed out, the sites have to be clean (chicken droppings are great fertilizer). Chickens will also eat pretty much anything so if you’re simply tossing out last night’s kitchen scraps, bears, and others, will come sniffing around.

In these days of $8 heads of cauliflower, the notion of supplying one’s own food moves from romanticism to necessity.

With proper regulations in place, allowing residents to keep a few chickens should be an easy decision for council to make.

Bill Phillips is a freelance columnist living in Prince George. He was the winner of the 2009 Best Editorial award at the British Columbia/Yukon Community Newspaper Association’s Ma Murray awards, in 2007 he won the association’s Best Columnist award. In 2004, he placed third in the Canadian Community Newspaper best columnist category and, in 2003, placed second. He can be reached at billphillips1@mac.com