Are backyard chickens allowed in your city?

It might not be so much that roosters are loud but more that they are mean little buggers.  We raised chickens when I was young; the rooster was ALWAYS chasing something-- the geese, the dogs, people.  Not sure if it's territory or what.

Actually, now that I say that, since cockfighting is literally roosters going at each other, it may be that they also ban roosters to avoid them fighting in everyone's yards.

 The hens don't make all that much noise. It's the roosters that get annoying fast.

We live out in the semi rural suburbs where we can have them, and we've had ours for several years. Everybody here lives on 1.5+ acre lots so there's a lot of space between houses. We got a rooster by accident initially and that little bugger was noisy. The neighbors all work and are up and gone before he would really start in so no one complained. He bugged the living crap out of ME because I had to listen to him all day, not unlike our black lab who also never shuts the heck up (he's inside most of the time so the only person he really annoys is me). I would much rather have neighbor chickens than a noisy neighbor dog any day of the week, and I own and love dogs.

And yes, the eggs do taste different, they're much fresher tasting. It's hard to describe the difference.

I am so spoiled by our eggs that I have a hard time eating eggs when we go anywhere for breakfast. The taste of the hen's egg depends a lot on what she eats. Ditto for the yolk color. Eggs from hens fed a commercial pellet diet taste more bland and will be paler. Eggs from a pastured hen will be richer, more  yellow, and have a more intense eggy taste. It has more to do with what they eat than with how fresh the eggs are. 

Our chickens have a lot of room to forage. We don't use chemicals on our grass and we've allowed more natural plants and grasses to come up in the backyard so they have a better variety of things to eat. They eat bugs, ants, nuts, fruit that's dropped from our trees (we have apple and peach trees), and whatever kitchen scraps we have. They LOVE any kind of berry, grapes, carrot peels, cooked rice, the tops of strawberries, all kinds of things. We do feed them commercial pellets but we only have to feed them about 1/2 of a normal amount of feed because they forage so much of their own diet. 

We do have a roo and he's loud, obnoxious, and very protective of his ladies but we put up with Felix because he's beautiful and he does a good job of looking after the hens while they are out in the open foraging.  We have three breeds of hen and they lay brown, blue, and dark brown eggs. I love having the variety in the egg cartons even if they all taste the same.  

Keeping them has been far easier than I thought it would be. The backyard chicken forums make it sound like it's a ton of work and hard to keep them healthy but that has not been my experience. I think the fact that we don't have to keep them confined in a small space has a lot to do with it. Birds kept confined get sick more. We have a big coop which gets a good cleaning every month with weekly poop clean-up (there is a board that catches their poopage and we scrape that weekly), we feed them daily and make sure they have water. They come when you call them and they like roosting on you when you sit on the ground. I think if we lived in town and had a small yard, we'd only have two or three hens but since we live out in the county we have six hens and a roo. 


Part of the flock enjoying a sunny morning and a snack of grapes:


Typical variety of eggs we get:

That egg is from our Black Copper Maran

Nope ... my next door neighbour would have a conniption if we had chickens   

@dociesx3

I wish I lived near, so I could beg some of those silkie hens from you.
I have 2 silkie rookies and docile they are NOT. They are horrible people. I just bought a hen but I need to make a new own for her and one of the Roos.