Political Protest, Iowa-Style: The Des Moines Chicken Parade

When I was a young man and still living in Iowa, for a while the state's more-or-less official motto was "Iowa - A Place to Grow," to which wags always replied, "Yes, a place to grow corn, soybeans, pork, and chickens." Iowa has always been an agricultural state, as I can personally affirm, not only from the years I grew up and lived there but from the fact that I come from a long line of farmers myself.

In Iowa's rural areas, many folks kept some chickens around. Chickens are great for turning food into meat and eggs. In warm weather they self-forage a lot, and will even hoover up grasshoppers and other pesky bugs; toss them some cracked corn and so on every now and then and you've got an effective, mobile, clucking backup protein source. During the Depression, my grandfather kept a huge flock of laying hens, and they not only had eggs and the occasional fryer but made some extra money selling both to the folks in town.

Nowadays, though, some Iowa folks who live in town - Des Moines, in fact, the state's capital - are keeping their own chickens, and the neighbors are objecting. This has led to the city council proposing the regulate the birds. The chicken owners aren't having it - and have staged a chicken parade to protest.

City Manager Scott Sanders said in a statement issued Friday evening that he thinks the city can find a way to amend the proposed restrictions so they will “better serve the whole community,” including chicken owners. The proposal that got preliminary approval from the city council would have cut the number of birds allowed from 30 to 12 and ban the roosters that are disturbing the peace in some neighborhoods.
Chicken parade organizer Ed Fallon said the city seemed to be overreacting to a total of three complaints about chickens that were registered between the start of 2020 and June 2024. A small group of people holding chickens came out Monday to march from the Statehouse to City Hall.

That's Iowa for you.

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I wish the chicken owners the best of cluck. One cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and if a parade gets the point across to the city council, that's good. People can get very attached to their critters, and dancing chick to chick with their feathered fowl may make the point better than sternly worded letters. We will monitor this issue with great eggs-pectations; the chicken owners will exhibit great hen-durance in this test of wills. There may well be a new pecking order in Des Moines before long.

The chicken owners may even find an unlikely ally at higher levels of government.

CHICKEN-MALA HARRIS IS GETTING OUT OF CONTROL!!!😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/4enY7aCHdx
— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) August 3, 2024

In closing, I will suggest this; the Great Land is friendly to keeping small stock like chickens, and if any of the bird owners in question find Des Moines' new rules too onerous, there is an obvious place here they could relocate to - Chicken, Alaska.