The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1881-03-08
GAME In THE CITY.
SALT LAKE CITY, March 4, 81.
Editors Herald:

/
SALT LAKE CITY, March 4, 81.
Editors Herald:
Yesterday afternoon everybody
was gazing with admiration upon
Venus with the naked eye, and to
day everybody is thinking about
our new President and Dave
McKenZie's Macbeth. Lay on,
McDuff," and so on. But that is not
what l am going to say. What
want to say is that you cannot have
a satisfactory garden if your neigh
bors' chickens run loose on it all the
summer. Chickens, old or young,
will eat strawberries, raspberrIeS,
currants, gooseberries, grapes, let
tuce, cabbage, tomatoes, corn, and
almost everything in the garden,
and good deal of it. and much that
they don't eat they will spoil. They
will scratch up your seeds and
newly set plants, and play hog with
your water burrows. A man told
me some time ago that his wife had
raised about fifty chickens in the
summer and sold them in the fall or
winter, making such a good thing
out of them that she thought of
raising hundred the next season.
why" said l, don't they cost you
as much as they are worth 2" 80
no" said he, I'VE never feed them"
Now he had only a small lot,
not large enough for half a
dozen unfed chickens to find
ther living on. So l could not
resist the conviction that his wife's
very profitable chickens must have
oeen raised at the expense of her
neighbOrs, which does not appear TO
me to be very cOmmendable way
to raise chickens, however profitable
to the owners of the birds.
Our city fathers have properly
provided that chickens may either
be shut up in summer by their
owners, or shut down upon sum-
marily by the owners neighbors.
1t is against the law for domestic
fowls to run at large during the
growing season. There is an ordi-
nance which avs, "All fowl such
as turkeys, ducks, geese and hens,
found running at large at any time
between the LIST day of March and
the 1st day of October, shall be for
feited to and shall be liable to be
killed by any person upon whose
premises theymay be found treSpaSS-
ing" So that mans fowls, run
ming on his neighbor's lot, are not
his own, but his neighbours, and the
latter's to have and to enjoy, alive
or dead, as seemeth to him good.
The above provision thus makes
fowls like common game or common
vermin for seven months to those
on whose lands they trespaSS. While
this is a just and righteous law,
still people do not like to confscate
or destroy their neighbors' treSpass-
ing fowls, because it is liable to excite
unneighborly feelings. But it has
to be done in self-defense some
times, because strawberries are ex-
pensiVe food to feed fowls upon, es-
pecially when those fowls are not
your own, and the strawberries are.
So of much ether garden stuff. The
best and most peaceable preventive
lies with the owners of the fowls.
The right and proper thing is for
nobody to keep fowls in the city,
unless he can keep them on his own
premises entirely through the sum-
mer. If a man does not like to raise
chickens for his neighbors to kill
and eat, neither does his nelghbOr
ike to feed chickens for him to kill
and eat or sell. A good rule of con-
duct is to do as you would be done
by.
One thing more. That chicken
ordinance shOnld be extended to in
elude until the first of November,
for the reason that there are many
grapes and other garden crops which
chickens prey upon, and which are
during the greater part
Of October, and sometimes later
than that in particularly mild sea-
N