Canada: “My backyard is a chicken playground”: Meet the Torontonian fighting to save the city’s urban hen program
Virginia Rankin talks about the joys of being a backyard hen keeper, why chickens make the best pets and Toronto’s latest move to ban the birds
By Alex Cyr | Photography By Joshua Best
Toronto Life
May 5, 2023
Excerpt:
At the end of April, the City of Toronto ruled to indefinitely pause UrbanHensTO, a pilot project launched in 2018 that permitted residents of select wards to keep up to four hens in their backyards. The latest—and possibly final—move in Toronto’s squawk saga was a surprising reversal: just last spring, the city had expanded the program and hinted at making it permanent by 2023. Decision makers blamed the chicken crackdown on a lack of funding and cited the risk of avian flu outbreaks brought on by the approximately 300 hens scattered around the city. We asked Virginia Rankin, one of the project’s 81 participants, what the city stands to lose by upholding its bird ban and why she thinks chickens make the best pets.
When it comes to animal companions, most people opt for dogs or cats. Why chickens?
I had chickens as pets when I was growing up in England. In 1983, when I was six, we moved to Toronto, into a house just outside of Forest Hill. One of the first things my mom did was buy some Canadian chickens—and she was soon in trouble with the city. She was shocked to learn that she couldn’t keep the hens. Ever since then, I’d been waiting to have access to a backyard flock, and I was thrilled when the UrbanHensTO program started. I went to hobby farms as far as Tottenham to buy four egg-laying hens at $25 apiece. They have since passed away, and the ones I have now are part of the second generation.
