Tell your friends you want to raise chickens and unless you live on a farm, theyll look at you kind of funny. But raising chickens in city settings and even apartments isnt quite as far fetched as it used to be. Chickens raised in urban settings are considered exotic pets, but they are remarkably easy to care for.

If youre lucky enough to be acquainted with someone who used to live on a farm or who got their chickens fresh from the butcher or grocer before commercial chicken farms were around, will tell you the eggs and chickens you buy today dont compare to the taste of the chicken and eggs that were home grown in the backyard. With progress and mass production, comes chemicals and preservatives that had no place on the farm. If you want to know how a chicken or egg was intended to taste, you will have to go to a farm or grow them yourself.

There are many reasons to raise chickens: they provide eggs, they provide meat, they can be raised for showing, they control bugs and pests, and they can provide wonderful fertilizer to assist flowers and vegetables in the garden.

Before you go out and bring home a parcel of chicks to raise, you should have a clear idea of why you want to raise chickens because that is going to be the basis of every other decision you make from brand of chicken, housing, the number of chickens, and other resources you will need to handle your responsibilities.

If you live in an apartment, you will need to have a different environment than if you live in a house in a city. A house in the city will have different requirements than one in an unincorporated suburb.

If you live near people, you are going to have consider not having a rooster, but just having pullets, and that means you wont be able to hatch your eggs and perpetuate your own line of chicks. If you want a rooster, you are going to have to consider the crowing the bird is going to make. They are going to crow a lot and loudly. You should know hens can make a lot of noise, too. They communicate with each other by clicking and if one of them has something they need to say, and if the other ones feel the need to respond, they can create some noise that will let you know theyre there.
You will also have to consider how youre going to keep your chickens from roaming onto your neighbors property. Animals dont care about such boundaries and if the chickens flies into your neighbors yard, the grass and garden greens are just as inviting as they are at your place, and they will eat them regardless of them not belonging to his owner. As a reward, he will leave droppings in the yard, and though the fertilizer is good, its also hot meaning it needs to compost before being applied or it will burn the grass or ground where it lays.

Because you can put the chicken in the city, but you cant take the city out of the chickens owner, some local schools even offer classes to teach city dwellers how to take care of their chickens.

And because city folk will be city folk, many of the cities that allow livestock to be grown within the limits, also sponsor coop walks a sort of garden walk, but with chicken coops where people go from place to place admiring the different coop designs. You have to imagine Pa Ingalls is somewhere laughing about that.