New Zoning Laws Allow for New Neighbors—Meet the Goats Next Door
Photo by Edith Burpee
First came the chickens, then the bees. So what’s the next animal that may be residing in a backyard next to you? Maybe goats. As the small-scale urban animal husbandry movement becomes a force in everyday urban life, more and more jurisdictions are being forced to revamp their laws to allow residents to hatch their own eggs, keep their own hives and—now—tend their own goats.
This spring, the city council in Wenatchee, Wash., amended its zoning code to allow residents in the town of 30,000 to keep goats, chickens and other animals in their yards, provided they have a certain amount of land. The law—which has a one-year review period—still bans peacocks, roosters and swine (they’re too loud).
Joe Morrison, managing attorney of the Wenatchee office of Columbia Legal Services, was one of a number of residents who petitioned the city council to change the law. He was partly motivated by his daughter’s desire to take up chicken farming—she’d seen some baby chicks at the local hardware store and got the bug to raise poultry for herself—and partly motivated by the fact that the old law was nonsensical.
“The city ordinances were hopelessly outdated and completely confusing. They were so bad that rabbits were designated fowl. If you wanted to have a chicken as a pet, you had to have an entire acre of pasture land that was fenced,” he says. “It didn’t make any sense.”
Click here to read the rest of “Got Your Goat” from the June issue of the ABA Journal.
