Toronto is no place for chickens

I have a little fantasy to share with you. It involves feathers, clucking and yolks, much homespun flapping of aprons in the backyard, the warmth of a chicken held against your belly as it lays in your lap (can that be right? It sounds unsavory) and the happy clap clap of children as I serve them another dish made with orange yolks and milky whites from our own backyard chicken coop. “Thank you, Mama!” they cry.

Thank you, Toronto, for letting me indulge my lifelong dream of a henhouse to call my own. Except the city may not, and wisely so, since my chicken scheme is possibly quite stupid/very stupid indeed.

As early as February, the city, having halted prosecutions of the urban chicken movement, will study small no-roosters urban coops. My favourite city councillor, the sainted Mary-Margaret McMahon , is thrilled. “It’ll be people who are into urban agriculture and food security and growing vegetables in their yard.” She dismisses worries about smells and noise.

I do not. I have enough trouble with the smells and noise of humans without coping with their poultry.

Urban hen ownership is no joke. Consider predators, mass death, the astounding expense of building a coop with insulation, ventilation, an exercise yard and entrance for you and your fowl, the drooping and wilting that makes you send sewage samples to vets for advice, manky eggs, ammonia buildup, cecal droppings and disease (metabolic, infectious, parasitic and behavioural). I will mention only in passing the “blood-tinged nostril discharge” of avian flu.

I like chickens in paintings and photos. Art hens. I hate them in real life, “with their blank beady eyes and the silly way they keep shaking their scrawny little heads,” as the essayist Jean Kerr once wrote.

Eggs are best left to experts, the hot sexy Ontario farmers who populate the new 2012 Faces of Farming calendar, the month of May’s Darryl being my current favourite. Note: He raises hens not in Riverdale but in Hastings County, as God surely intended.

The poultry mania is part of what I call Portlandia Syndrome. Named after the coolest show on television, Portlandia resides on the Independent Film Channel, part of its coolness being the fact that you can’t see it. I bought it on DVD .

Portlandia is a satire of urban hipsters living in the Oregon city “where young people go to retire.” SNL’s Fred Armisen and rock-comedian Carrie Brownstein recreate the slacker ’90s in the new Seattle, where people grow beets in their driveway, entitled cyclists ride through stores (“I’m on a bike!”) and organic locavore diners interrogate the waitress about the provenance of their chicken.

Reassured that he was heritage-breed, woodland-raised and fed only sheep’s milk, soy and hazelnuts, they fret that the hazelnuts were trucked in. Eventually they leave the table to check, visiting “Colin’s” home farm and meeting his friends. After briefly joining a cult, they return and continue ordering.

I love Portlandia, a place so earnest and self-absorbed that it’s more of an ethic than a city. Any pillow or mug can be made cool if you “Put a bird on it!” You can build a business on the slogan “We can pickle that!” the trend born of brining, which can be usefully done to chickens (sorry, Colin) but not to lamps or mangled stilettos as they do in Portlandia.