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The Associated Press reports that Rogers, Arkansas, has passed an ordinance limiting the ownership of fowl in nonagricultural zones:
Linda Bishop supplements her small disability income by raising chickens behind her home and selling their eggs. But a new city ordinance in her hometown of Rogers might change that ... Bishop's flock of 23 hens and a rooster is too large under the terms of the ordinance, which limits hens to four per home and outlaws roosters. She says she's kept chickens for 10 or 12 years and thinks that's unfair.
"I've never had no problems or no complaints from any of my neighbors," Bishop, 57, said in a telephone interview.
Double negatives aside, I'm conflicted here.
I don't like government telling people what to do with their property, and I know that zoning and other city council legislation can easily be used to further petty tyranny and intrusion. So I sympathize with Bishop, who had the rules changed on her:
[S]he recently bought a $1,600 henhouse and says the city has told her she'll have to spend more money to have her property rezoned as an agricultural area if she wants to keep her chicken business going. She said she simply doesn't have the cash and is looking for someone to help her.
One danger of democracy is that people often outlaw what they don't like, intruding on the property rights and privacy of their neighbors. Still, imagine that you lived next to Ms. Bishop. Would you object to all of the below provisions?
The ordinance puts in place several other restrictions, including a requirement that the birds be kept in a clean, secure enclosure at least 25 feet from the nearest neighbor's home. Slaughtering birds outside is prohibited. The resolution also requires people to obtain a permit and pay a $5 annual fee to keep fowl.
Maybe Bishop and her birds were there before her neighbors, so they can't claim ignorance when they moved in, and maybe they have no complaints. But this law isn't targeting Bishop. There might well be others who decide one day to go out and buy a few dozen chickens to roam the backyard (not having been to Arkansas, I can't say). I wonder how this affects property values next door.
I know all about the dangers of regulation, the inefficiencies of political solutions, the potential of market solutions, the unintended consequences and slippery slopes at work when government starts meddling with property rights. I get it. I'd love to see private solutions implemented instead of political ones. In a private community, it would still come down to a vote, but one might imagine some variety. Chicken-people could start their own development, and write chicken-owning rights into the homeowners association constitution. It would be preferable to a one-size-fits-all law. If one town passes this ordinance, others might follow. It could become a state law. Then the chicken people have nowhere to go. Competing private communities give people more choices. But this is a town, not a private community, so a political solution is what we have, and a one-size-fits-all law might be down the road, which I generally oppose. With all that said, I still wouldn't want my next-door neighbor coming home with 40 chickens.
To which we might ask, what of mine would my neighbor choose to outlaw, if given the power? Which is why my neighbor and I aren't given the power to outlaw each other's decisions at every whim. One must persuade a city council, and one can only hope that city councils are not overzealous and property rights are not trampled in the process of regulation. Of course, this leads in many directions: Perhaps such trampling is the rule rather than the exception; perhaps much regulation is to benefit donors and friends of the politicians; perhaps the chicken law is by itself a good idea, but it doesn't exist by itself--it is the product of a government that is also going to pass a whole bunch of laws that are not good ideas; perhaps it would be better, on balance, to have to put up with chickens if it meant that the government would not be doing all sorts of other things to private property, like taking people's homes to turn into tax-revenue-producing mansions.
To sum up, I don't like government intruding on property rights. And I don't like my neighbors owning too many chickens that run loose next to my house.
I guess what I'm really saying is I'm glad I don't live in Arkansas.
The full article, for as long as it remains online, is here:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/06/23/chicken.ordinance.ap/index.html
