In Palm Coast Sheep, Not Chicken, May Safely Graze

August 11, 2023 | FlaglerLive | 48 Comments

The Palm Coast City Council’s rejection of a pilot program that would have allowed chickens in a handful of backyards is disappointing. But the council since its earliest days has tended to run the city more as a homeowners association bound to conformity and the somnolence of residents out to pasture rather than as a vibrant city welcoming of differences, innovation, young and working people.

We saw this when the city shot down home-based bakeries a decade ago, just as the economy was beginning to redefine the workplace. We saw it two years ago when the city renewed its ban on essential workers parking their small trucks in driveways. We saw it two months ago when the city rejected up to $15 million in grant money to build electric vehicle charging stations. Now we see it in a city of Babbitts banding up against chickens.

This kind of shuffling timidity isn’t becoming of an ambitious city. We create unnecessary choke points that could instead be the welcoming emblems to those self-reliant Americans Emerson so prized in the rising spirit of his time. Code Enforcement Manager Barbara Grossman’s proposal would have permitted up to 25 backyard coops, four hens maximum, no roosters, all strictly regulated and even subject to neighbors’ consent, which would have been absurd, though I’d love to have that kind of say over my neighbors’ insufferable dogs.

Twenty-five permits is barely a pilot program. It’s more like a Future Problem Solvers project that happens to spread out in a few yards, the way one such (winning) projects did with bats a few years ago, with no objections from anyone. Chances are that there are many more undocumented coops now, ICE enforcement against illegal chickens being what it is. The pilot program would have amounted to an amnesty. But you know how our red neighbors feel about amnesties.

Arguments against backyard chickens were not convincing, starting with Councilman Nick Klufas’s entirely Machiavellian calculation. I don’t think he’s personally opposed to backyard chickens at all. He grew up with them. He’s a live and let live kind of guy. But he’s running for County Commission, and he literally said that he can’t have backyard chickens attached to his name. That’s politics. But it’s certainly not the kind of leadership he displayed in his demolition of the witch-hunt for a forensic audit of city accounts. True, as Klufas projects, 85 percent of voters would shoot down backyard chickens in a referendum. But they’d do so mostly in reaction to the inevitable mold clogging social mierda: false assumptions, misinformation, prejudice. Chickens, goes the claim, attract rodents. Not exactly: garbage, standing water, bird feeders and food left out attracts rodents, so your backyard is already there. Chicken coops can be rodent proof, and chickens are a natural form of pest control. The chemicals in your lawn are still more destructive to us all than any rodent could possibly be.

Chickens, goes the claim, are noisy. Really? In a city where every street is a tabernacle choir of yapping dogs, of ear-splitting mowers, of swaggering mufflers, of garages more industrialized than Hargrove Grade and enough construction zones to have turned Palm Coast into a permanent Big Dig, a couple of clucking chickens would be no more discernible than the fan popping bubble gum two sections over at a NASCAR race.

Of course the moment you mention having any kind of farm animal in your backyard, next thing you’ll hear is how about goats, how about pigs, how about camels and elephants, how about RINOs. Which reminds me of the homophobe trope that legalized gay marriage would lead to bestiality. It’s what Socrates, whose hemlocked last words were about a chicken, would call chicken-shit arguments. Backyard chicken advocates aren’t without their own feathering of sanctimony. The churlish in me doesn’t buy into the self-sufficiency fad. No backyard is going to yield enough eggs and vegetables for a family to reduce its dependence on grocery stores. The stores are now varied enough and sell enough socially responsible products–to the extent that Ron DeSantis and Paul Renner haven’t banned them yet–to make backyard efforts more of an NPR affectation than a necessity.

But then, so is gardening. No one is banning that. Backyard barbecues are a shortcut to cancer. No one is banning those. Lawn-maintenance is the single-most useless, polluting, noisy, wasteful, disruptive, unproductive, oppressive suburban ritual in America. Unfortunately, no one is banning that.

Not to go Wendell Berry on you, but let’s also not downplay the small revival of self-reliance inherent in backyard gardens and animals. They may not make a material difference in one’s life, but they make a more important, spiritual difference that better fosters a sense of autonomy and communion with nature than shopping under Publix’s klieg lights and keeping an enameled lawn. They can teach more to a child than half a year in school, our lobotomized Florida schools especially. Not every innovation is a garage start-up. Sometimes the mold-breaking is a rewind to lost values.

Point being that it’s not my place to hold veto power over my neighbor’s differences. Cynical fabrications aside, a chicken coop next door isn’t going to affect my property values or my senses anymore than my neighbor’s hydrangeas.

But in Palm Coast, the homeowner association mentality rules the roost, ironically with groupthink restrictions inspired by provincial socialism. In a city that already regulates what color we can paint our homes, what vehicles we can park in our driveways, how tall we can let our grass grow and what flags and signs we can plant in our yards, we only pretend to revere property rights and “liberty for all.” We mutter those words of the Pledge with the drabness of suburban monotones just before voting to crush our neighbor’s liberties, because they don’t conform. We defeated backyard chickens because we’re a city of sheep.

Pierre Tristam is FlaglerLive’s editor. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.