Last September, a cappuccino-colored stray chicken appeared in Katherine Rae Mondo’s neighborhood in Oakland, Calif. After it hung around the same intersection for a couple of days, Mondo took it in — her house had a coop, and she was already caring for a housemate’s three-chicken flock.
She named the stray chicken Terribad, since, unlike most hens, “she was kind of a wild woman who didn’t obey the rules, and she could fly,” Mondo says.
It was easy to welcome another chicken, partly because Oakland’s local policies for keeping poultry aren’t that restrictive. Roosters aren’t allowed, and hens just have to be housed at least 20 feet from any house. That’s it. No rules about the number of birds, their coops, slaughter or care. Bare-bones local laws around chickens are really common, says Catherine Brinkley, a veterinarian and urban planner at the University of California, Davis.
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