10-Year-Old Lobbies Bloomfield Hills City Commission for Backyard Chickens

Caroline Baxter thinks Bloomfield Hills residents should be allowed to keep up to five chickens in their back yards. (Screenshot: WDIV video)

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Bloomfield Hills city officials don’t encounter many lobbyists who haven’t yet been promoted out of middle school.

But what Caroline Baxter, 10, lacks in years, she makes up for in passion and determination.

And the plucky East Hills Elementary School fifth-grader is determined that backyard chickens should be allowed in Bloomfield Hills. So assembled the reasons why she and her neighbors should be allowed to keep up to five chickens in backyard coops, and made a grown-up appearance before the Bloomfield Hills City Commission and asked for a zoning change, WDIV-TV and the Observer & Eccentric report.

She was persuasive, too, arguing among other things:

• Hens, unlike roosters, are fairly quiet.
• Dogs and cats spread more diseases than do chickens.
• Chickens don’t bite, bark or chase cars.
• A 40-pound dog makes a greater a mess in the back yard each day than 10 chickens in a day.

“She came up with a rather well-prepared letter making a request, and it gave these points about how chickens are better than dogs and cats, and cleaner,” Bloomfield HIlls City Manager Jay Cravens told the television station.

But what’s to stop someone in toney Bloomfield Hills, one of of the nation’s wealthiest cities with an average per-capita income of $105,000, from starting agricultural enterprises on their properties?

Caroline already thought of that. Her zoning proposal requires chickens be housed in coops and sets limits on the number of birds an individual could possess, and could even require residents to take classes on chicken husbandry.

“You would not want just anyone looking after chickens,” she told the commission.

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Caroline took chickens under her protective animal lover’s wing after attending farm camp at her school district’s Charles L. Bowers School Farm. A scrawny black hen with feathers that looked like they’d been rearranged by a tornado caught her eye and it was, ahem, love at first cluck.

She named the chicken Midnight, and says they’re friends.

“I went to farm camp and we got the opportunity to hold a chicken, and so I just really bonded with them,” she told WDIV-TV. “They’re so passionate, and they’re really social.”

Though backyard chicken ordinances in places like Ferndale, Lansing and Madison Heights accommodate residents’ taste for fresh eggs and meat, Caroline thinks chickens make great pets and she’d like to add one to a menagerie that includes gerbils, dogs, fish, a a guinea pig named Penelope and “a bunch of snails.”

Brad Baxter said the idea to seek the zoning change was his daughter’s.

“She really has a liking for chickens,” he said. “This is all her idea, but I did grow up with three chickens (in Wisconsin) and my experience with them is they tend to be very affectionate and pretty good pets.

“It would be nice if the city was even willing to try it on a limited trial basis,” he said.

Tell Us: Do you think backyard chickens should be allowed in Bloomfield Hills?

The commission will take up the issue again on Jan. 13.

If the commission does vote to change the ordinance, it would be turning back the clock in some respects.

After Caroline made her zoning request last month, City Commissioner Sarah McClure said her father was a doctor and gentleman farmer who raised chickens and pigs – one named Josephine and another one named Napoleon – in their yard.

Mayor Pro Tem Stuart Sherr cackled a bit at the analogy-rich proposal.

“This is clearly a meaty issue,” he said. “It’s about time this matter came to roost, because it’s clearly been cooped up for too long ... and I’m just fried about it, frankly.”

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