Category Archives: Pets and Animals

Bittersweet Feelings

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After the chicken ordinance spectacle, Britton and I received an email from the city that said we could come into compliance within a “reasonable schedule of attrition” which we are taking to mean that we can keep them until they die. Which leaves us back where we have been for the last nearly 2 years…with our chickens. In a way we are relieved…the way that the code was going was turning into a bureaucratic nightmare with inspections, fees, permits and government nosey-ness into our business. So in a way, we have bittersweet feelings about how the whole thing turned out.

There are some people who worked on the process with us who really want to push to get this back on the city agenda and to appeal it. I…am just not really feeling it. I am tired of fighting for something that I think was going down the wrong route of micromanagement anyway. I am bitter in that I fully believe people should be able to raise their own food, pets and utilize their property in the way they so choose, but it is sweet that they allowed us to keep our chickens anyway AND we don’t have to get a permit to keep them!


One of my favorite songs and by a great Colorado band!

Bittersweet feelings goes further than just this chicken ordinance thing. We have bittersweet feelings toward Greeley in general. We feel sweetly about this being our hometown and appreciate everything that it has allowed us to do and the personal growth we’ve attained here, but bitter that it doesn’t seem to want to change with the times and feels like it is pushing us out. That is part of the reason we want to move and live in Puerto Rico…we have grown out of shell here and are looking to expand our horizons.

We went to the 2nd out of three bee classes yesterday and decided to wait until we are living in Puerto Rico to get our own colonies. We do want to go learn hands on with some beekeepers in the area however. We just figured that we should be clearing out things from our lives here rather than bringing more in that we will only have to get rid of before we leave anyway.

Yesterday was also Britton’s and my dad’s birthday so we went out to lunch after the bee class and discussed their lives on this earth. My dad is exactly double the age of Britton! Strange coincidences in life.

We are still not sure what our exact ETA in Puerto Rico will be but we are still thinking 2010 will be a year of many changes. A lot of it depends on my job, Britton’s ability to work remote or find another job and whether or not we want to start our own business or just live down there.

It is beginning to feel more and more real, this change that is coming over us. And while I am tremendously excited, it is still that ambivalence, that bittersweet feeling, that makes it all the harder. If it were all bad or all good, life would be so much simpler. But it’s the complexity that makes it interesting.

 

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Greeley City Council Chops the Chicken Ordinance’s Neck

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Tonight we were told that the Greeley City Council would be simply moving the chicken ordinance to its final stage which would be the public input and final vote on February 2nd. No need to show up as it is a simple formality and we would have our day in the sun on February 2nd to discuss the backyard hen ordinance. So Britton and I decided to watch it from the comfort of our basement living room. It would be difficult to say that it was a serious matter because if I didn’t know better I’d say we were watching a comedy. An awful, scary, comedy.


The headless chicken AKA Greeley City Council: alive but barely functional

First they pulled the chicken ordinance from the consent agenda. Sometimes they will do this so that they can clarify certain items so this didn’t surprise us. They talked about it a little and then the oh, so eloquent Maria Secrest “kind of” suggested that they kill the ordinance and not even move it to public opinion and input. Which is what we have spent the last 6 months working towards! She was not very clear though, so someone else, Sandi Elder made a motion to review the ordinance in a year if it passed on February 2nd.

Then John Gates said that it depended on if the first motion carried. Well, it wasn’t exactly a motion, but then Secrest decided to make it a motion. Poor old Archibeque didn’t even know which item they were voting on, but upon hearing that Gates and Secrest didn’t want to continue with it he said that since EVERYONE didn’t want the ordinance that there was no sense in talking about it. (Since when did 2 people out of 7 become EVERYONE?) But happily, he did ask why Secrest wanted to kill the ordinance in the first place.

This is where the comedy gets really good...she said that if we allowed chickens in Greeley, PEOPLE MIGHT SHOOT EACH OTHER! Yes. That was her excuse for not allowing chickens. I had to close my eyes and blink extra hard to see if I heard that right. I thought I had every myth and fallacy out there covered.  But no, I hadn’t heard about that…I couldn’t help but laugh…yes…this is what she said…If a person’s dog went into another person’s yard and they had chickens and the said dog killed those chickens, the crazy chicken owner might just grab a gun and SHOOT the neighbor and she would not want on her conscience the death of a toddler. WHAT??! WHAT??! Am I living in the Twilight Zone? Is she that off her rocker?


Gunned down by a chicken

Apparently she and three other council members are (off their rockers) because they decided to take a vote and while Mike Finn, Sandi Elder and Donna Sapienza mentioned property rights and at least hearing from their constituents at the next council meeting, the other four voted the measure down out of the consent agenda. This was not after considerable confusion about whether or not they were voting the item down or voting the item in…that damnastid double negative language the government loves to confuse us with. I was watching the whole thing with my mind swirling… now what exactly is happening? A “no” vote means “yes” and a “yes” vote means “no” to the measure. Ok…wait, now what are they voting on again?

In the end, I am not sure what exactly happened but apparently the “yes” votes said “no” to the ordinance continuing on which in essence left us with nothing. No chance to speak, no chance to be heard, no respect for the process, nor our time, the time of the city staff, the planning commission or even the people who were against it who may have been planning to come out in two weeks to give them a piece of their mind. This was the most disgraceful example of local government ineptitude I have ever seen. Incredible!

What will this mean for us? Well that remains to be seen. We still have our original defense which we never had a response to. We also have a few more tricks up our sleeves. In any case, this is not the end of the matter, and we will happily continue our lives in Greeley with Schnoodle, Kitty, Henrietta, Omelette, Football and Greenfoot, at least until we get the hell out of this crazy warp zone.

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A Beginning Beekeeper?

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Today Britton and I went to our first beginning beekeeper class that was put on by the Northern Colorado Beekeeper’s Association. It was quite fascinating all the different things you can learn about keeping bees.


I got to try on the beekeeper hat

We learned about the brood and the queen, the hive and the mead. The honey, the comb, the wax and the drones. We heard just about everything about the biology of the bees and next week the class continues to please.

We will have the opportunity to buy bees and the whole kit and caboodle. It is a more expensive hobby than chicken keeping, but it can also be more lucrative, as they said everyone is looking to purchase honey! It will cost about $200 to get set up with one hive. I think we will try it because we want to have honey bees in Puerto Rico and this will be a great way to learn about it here, although some of the specifics are slightly different.

I searched beekeepers of Puerto Rico and found some info and pictures from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. It is pretty cool that Mayagüez is such an agricultural university there because it will be fairly close to where we want to live, so we can get lots of info on beekeeping (apicultura). We talked with an expert in the class who kept bees in Hawaii and the challenges are somewhat different, but overall, it is slightly easier to keep them because of the weather, but the diseases and problems can also be harder to deal with.

Overall, we had a lot of fun learning about this and found out that beekeeping is completely legal in Greeley! Which makes me laugh that chickens are going to be so regulated. Bees, like chickens, have so many benefits that there is not just one reason to keep them. They pollinate area plants, vegetables and fruit trees, they make honey and beeswax. The honey can be used in all sorts of applications and foods as can the wax to make soaps, candles and even lotions and creams. I’ve even read that taking or eating bee pollen and even local honey can help with allergies!

What wonderful fascinating little creatures. We’ll soon see what this new adventure brings us!

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A Rant: Greeley Government on Backyard Hens

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Today we went down to the city council chambers for the planning commission’s review of the proposed backyard hen ordinance. Even though I have been through some of these processes to change city code before, this is still such a learning experience to me. What I have learned overall though is that if you give the government ANYTHING to review, you have to go through so many hoops, red tape and bureaucracy that it’s amazing anything gets done.

And when it does get done, I am beginning to see who really runs things. In the case of Greeley I see that it is not the planning commission, nor even the city council, but the city staff. The Community Development Director runs the show in this backyard hens thing. She is considered the expert and therefore a lot of leniency goes to her opinion. Same goes for the city attorney. While ultimately the city council makes the decisions, the specifics of the codes have been worked on behind the scenes long before.

I almost think in the case of this ordinance that we would have been better off leaving it alone and buying more land behind our house than having to deal with all this bureaucracy and pleasing of every different type of person. Of course we had our chickens without approval for over a year and no one said a word until we were on the front page of the paper.

But there were other people who are not as rebellious as we are and went through all the proper channels and were frustrated with the current code. So when we go and try to change it I think, this will be fairly easy. We simply have to change the code in one of two ways:  a) call them pets and be done with it, b) go from 1 chicken per 4000 sq ft to maybe 1 per 1000 sq ft. But no…we have to write a whole book on the matter plus multiple meetings, committees, discussions, revisions and bring in all the experts.

No wonder we have so much gridlock at the national level to get things done. I am sure this is not just the case in government, but in corportation boards and other entities, but government is where we, the people, are also privy to the goings-on (if we can stand it without tearing ALL our hair out, not to mention that for people who work or have other less flexible jobs than Britton and I do this would be impossible to be part of).  


Why are they picking on us (or is it pecking)?

I  guess sometimes I wish we had the more simpler time when corporations and huge government entities didn’t run things with such thumbs-on control. An inspector for your backyard? A fee and permit to raise/grow your own food? What will we think of next? Now I know where science fiction novels get their premises from. When did we get so backward that there is no license in Colorado required to sell tobacco, the deadliest consumer item out there, but we have to have a permit and fee to get our own eggs? Oh yah, big corporations that control the big bureaucratic government. If the business is big enough, the local, state and federal governments see dollar $igns and will forgive any transgressions including killing 1200 Americans DAILY, but if it is an individual trying to make a difference by raising her own food, being environmentally and economically conscious, CHARGE her.

Yah, you could say I’m a little frustrated.

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