City of Marion Claims Chickens Have Hooves

To the members of the Marion Common Council:

Marion City Code § 96.04 forbids anyone to "place or keep… within the city limits; any and all hoofed animals, including but not limited to poultry, equine (horses, mules), porcine (pigs), bovine (cattle), sheep or goats…"

Read that again. Marion's city code classifies the chicken as a hoofed animal.

That's the actual text, adopted as Ordinance 7-2014 and amended in 2016. And before anyone tells me I'm reading it uncharitably, let's diagram it, the way Sally Herring taught me at Madison-Grant High School.

The noun is animals. The adjective sitting under it is hoofed. Together they name the one class of thing this sentence forbids: hoofed animals.

So what do the words including but not limited to attach to? Not to some second category the sentence never names. They attach to that same noun. Everything that follows them is a list of examples of hoofed animals — and the very first example the ordinance offers is poultry. The sentence does not set chickens apart from hoofed animals. It names the chicken as one.

Every other animal named actually has hooves: horses, mules, pigs, cattle, sheep, goats. Poultry is the lone entry in a category it cannot possibly belong to. Chickens have feet. With toes. I don't remember much from tenth-grade English, but I remember enough to know that sentence would not have gone over easy with a tough grader like Mrs. Herring.

The following section, 96.05, lays out every exception to the rule, and each one concerns hoofed livestock: the 4-H Fairgrounds, the animal shelter and the Humane Society taking temporary custody of rescued animals, and rescued horses, donkeys or mules placed on lots of at least 55,000 square feet with 8,000 square feet of pasture per animal. Pasture. Fencing. Shelter. Not one line of it contemplates a bird. They were thinking about horses when they built the category — and then shoehorned poultry into it instead of giving birds a sentence of their own.

Fowl play?

Every February, the Tractor Supply out on the bypass fills a tub with live baby chicks and sells them to anyone who walks in. That store sits inside Marion city limits. And § 96.04 says "no person shall place or keep." A store that places live chicks in a tub and keeps them inside the city limits is, on any plain reading of that sentence, doing the thing the ordinance prohibits.

To my knowledge, that store has never been cited, and it never should be. The TSC chick sale runs every spring, out in the open, advertised. Whatever Marion's real position on § 96.04 may be, it clearly isn't "send code enforcement out to the bypass."

But look hard at what that means. Marion has an ordinance the city does not actually believe in. We don't enforce it against the retailer who sells the birds, so why do we enforce it against the family that takes them home? Same chicks, same city limits, same sentence of the same code — and the only variable is which side of the checkout counter you happen to be standing on.

That's not a policy. That's a rule the city quit believing in — and it has been quietly governing what Marion families may keep in their own backyards for a decade. When an ordinance can't be applied evenly, it isn't protecting anybody. It's just sitting there waiting for the wrong neighbor to file the wrong complaint.

Family economics

You may have heard backyard hens save families money. At today's prices, they mostly don't.

Run the numbers on six hens. Feed runs about $220 a year. Add bedding, grit, replacement chicks, and a coop amortized over a decade, and you're near $400 to $500 annually for roughly a hundred dozen eggs — call it $4 to $5 a dozen. Store eggs averaged $2.14 this past June. University of Florida Extension ran this same math and found that feed costs alone put a backyard dozen north of six dollars, concluding home eggs are unlikely to deliver real savings against grocery prices. They're right. Anyone telling you a flock pays for itself is probably selling chicken coops.

However, in March 2025 the national average price for eggs hit $6.23 a dozen, and on one day that month it touched $8.15. For most of the first half of 2025, store eggs cost more than backyard eggs did. Families who already had hens watched that crisis on the news instead of in their grocery cart.

That's the whole argument. Not savings — stability. A flock isn't a coupon, it's insurance. You pay a modest premium in the calm years for the privilege of not caring what avian influenza does to a barn in Iowa. Marion families ought to be allowed to make that trade-off for themselves if they want to. Right now they aren't.

Hens aren't just egg factories

Here's what the ordinance debate leaves out. Chickens are social, curious, individually recognizable animals. They form real bonds, they come when called, and they will absolutely follow a five-year-old around a yard hoping for a handful of scratch. Ask anyone who keeps them: every hen has a personality — the bold one, the bossy one, the one who hides. Chickens invented the pecking order. We just borrowed the phrase.

For a kid, six hens are a daily lesson in responsibility, biology, and where food actually comes from. For an older resident living alone, they're company that needs you every morning. Marion permits dogs, cats, ferrets, rabbits, parrots, and lizards inside the city limits. It is genuinely hard to explain why a Rhode Island Red is where we draw the line.

Marion is the odd bird out

And not by a narrow margin. A 2015 study led by Boston University School of Public Health researchers reviewed the 150 largest U.S. cities and found 93% permit poultry in some capacity. Among the 100 largest, chickens are banned in only three — one of them Fort Wayne. Nationally, the American Pet Products Association counted 11 million households keeping backyard chickens in 2025, up 28% in two years. People are flocking to this for a reason.

Here in Indiana, Marion is ringed by cities that sorted this out years ago. South Bend has allowed six hens since 2013 — no roosters, a $20 permit, and a 15-foot setback from the property line. Bloomington allows five by permit. Indianapolis, Evansville, Kokomo, Carmel and Fishers allow them as well. Goshen is the instructive one — it adopted hens, then in 2018 repealed its own permit fee and neighbor-consent requirement because the program ran so smoothly it didn't need them. Fort Wayne is the cautionary tale, rejecting hens three times, most recently by a 2-to-7 council vote in December 2023.

A citizen petition drew roughly 896 signatures here in Marion back in 2015, came before Council, and went nowhere. Ten years later, maybe it's time to stop being cooped up by a law that says chickens have hooves.

The objections, addressed

It's worth noticing how much of the case against hens is nothing more than unwarranted Chicken Little panic.

Noise. Hen clucking runs about 60 decibels — ordinary conversation, per Utah State University Extension. A barking dog or a lawnmower is closer to 90. A rooster's crow can reach 130. Marion already tolerates dogs and mowers all day long. If it's noise you're worried about, ban roosters, not hens.

Rodents. The honest concern isn't birds, it's feed. Rodents come for spilled grain, not for chickens. Store feed in sealed metal containers, clean up spills, pull feeders at night, and the problem never starts. That's a rule you can write directly into an ordinance — and we should.

Disease. Salmonella is real and manageable, not grounds for prohibition. The CDC's final 2024 update counted 470 infections nationwide linked to backyard poultry. The remedy is the CDC's own: wash your hands, keep birds out of the house, keep toddlers away from live poultry. As for avian influenza — the disease that caused the price spike — the recent outbreak began in a commercial turkey flock in Dubois County, Indiana, and commercial operations have absorbed the overwhelming majority of losses. Six hens in a Marion backyard are not a biosecurity threat.

Property values. No solid evidence a few well-kept hens affect them. What harms a block is blight and neglect — and Marion's nuisance code already covers every bit of that, chickens or not.

Pecking away at our freedoms

This is Republican country, and the Grant County Republican Party's own website states that it is committed to advancing "the core principles of self reliance" and growing "the American Dream for all citizens."

So I ask in good faith: which part of self-reliance is served by an ordinance making it illegal for a homeowner to keep hens in a fenced backyard on property she pays taxes on — an ordinance we don't even enforce against the store that sells them?

If limited government, personal responsibility, and self-reliance mean anything at the local level, they ought to mean something in our backyards.

A compre-hen-sive proposal

So let's not walk on eggshells. Here's an ordinance this Council could adopt tomorrow, modeled on what already works in South Bend, Goshen, and dozens of peer cities:

• Hens only. No roosters. Resolves the noise objection outright.
• Up to six hens per single-family lot.
• Coop and run in the rear yard only, set back at least 10 feet from property lines and 25 feet from any neighboring dwelling.
• A predator-proof, ventilated coop with a reasonable size cap, around 120 square feet.
• Feed stored in sealed, rodent-proof containers. Non-negotiable and strictly enforced.
• No on-site slaughter.
• Incidental sale or gifting of surplus eggs permitted from the property — no signage, no wholesale, no storefront.
• Enforcement through the existing Chapter 96 nuisance and animal-control provisions, with revocation for repeat violators.
• No fee, or a nominal one. Goshen proved the red tape was unnecessary.

And while you're in there, fix the sentence. I am not asking you to deregulate poultry — the word covers ducks, geese and turkeys, and Marion has every reason to keep saying no to those. I am asking you to move poultry out of a category it cannot belong to and regulate it on its own terms, the way the proposal above does. Whatever this Council decides about hens, § 96.04 should not go another decade telling the citizens of Marion that a chicken has hooves.

The ask

Members of the Council: the birds are already being sold, in the open, inside our own city limits, under an ordinance nobody enforces and nobody should. All any of us is asking is that Marion stop criminalizing what happens after the drive home. Put a hens-only ordinance on the agenda, hold the hearing, and give Marion families the same modest freedom residents of Indianapolis, South Bend, Bloomington and Goshen already have.

Let's give Marion something to crow about.

Respectfully,

Ryan Kellermeyer
Marion, Indiana