The banning of cattle was understandable. They knocked over fences, left droppings in the street, and fell through wooden sidewalks. "As a modern view of the city took hold, the absence of cows raised property values, in part through the cultural association of cows and backwardness," according to Fred Brown, a historian who wrote an academic paper on the subject last year as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington. Owners of roaming cows were hit with rocks and threatened with pistols. The cows were sent packing in 1907, writes Brown, around the same time many neighborhoods kicked out blacks and Asians.
Today's land-use code still has historical strictures against livestock and other farm animals. But it is generous toward rabbits and bees. A code revision in 1982 allowed people in all residential zones to keep up to three "domestic fowl"—defined as chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese, quail, pheasants, and squab, but apparently not emus or ostriches. The birds could be tapped for eggs or slaughtered for roasting, at home if desired.
Kevin P. Casey
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"We were one of the first to allow chickens into the backyards," says Angelina Shell, who tracks about 500 urban chickens for Seattle Tilth. Following Seattle's lead were Portland, Ore., and Madison, Wis. "We did something before Portland—it's amazing!" gloats Shell.
The loosening of the law on poultry came at a time when many residents were latching onto the sustainability movement. A 1984 review by the city concluded that "a growing number of households in the City are keeping rabbits or domestic fowl...[as] people wish greater self-sufficiency, and as they become more interested in urban agriculture, additive-free food, and composting." Sustainability doesn't explain, however, Seattle's next disastrous move in animal liberation.
Sus scrofa bittatus, the potbellied pig, was the last critter to be legalized by the city. That was in 1993. The headaches continue today, a reminder of the peril that can lurk when politicians put unfamiliar animals into the hands of the masses.
The pig push followed the same script as today's little-goat campaign. It began when pig owners sought protection from meddling zoning inspectors by appealing to then–council member Sue Donaldson. Swine populists sent letters lauding their chosen pet's merits: small, has a "little, pink corkscrew tail." An especially handsome pig was selected to serve as representative for the species. In this case, it was a Ballard porker with the smooth moniker of Willie G. "Willie brings pleasure to everyone, young and old, in our neighborhood," gushed one of G's fans. (Descended from wild pigs in the jungles of Asia, most potbellies tend to be about a tenth the weight of a 1,000-pound farm pig.)
But problems began surfacing a year after the pigs made it onto the city's "good" list. People thought they were buying Babe. Often, it turned out they'd purchased Hogzilla. The law said they had to stay under 150 pounds, but either because of overfeeding or the unscrupulous vending of regular-sized pigs, some swine ballooned to 300 pounds. Pigs grew so fat that rolls of flesh blinded their eyes, says Judy Woods, who runs a home for cast-off swine in Stanwood. The owners couldn't give them away for adoption because Seattle Animal Control considered these massive pigs to be livestock. Woods recalls visiting a house in which an overweight pig had lived for nine years in a bed of feces; its leg was rotted to the bone.
The pigs also had instinctual complexities that the average owner didn't comprehend. Between the ages of 18 months and 2 years, wild pigs go through a sort of teenage-rebellion stage, in which they aggressively test the boundaries of their peers to establish a pecking order. With no pigs to spar with—the law specified one pig per household—the oinkers had to make do with the next best thing: their owners.
"You've been taking care of this animal since it was a baby, and all of a sudden it charges at you and you back up. If you back up, you've immediately given that pig domination over you, and you don't even know you did it," says Woods. "I've had pigs brought to the sanctuary who had cornered professional basketball players on the couch—wouldn't let them off."
Woods says she's taken in hundreds of unwanted or abused pigs from Seattle. And as the trend's half-life has continued to expire—George Clooney's 18-year-old Max gave up the ghost just last year—Woods still receives calls from the city every week. For that reason, she's opposed to the current goat ordinance.
"It'd be like me taking you and plomping you on Mars with somebody; you don't speak their language, and they're going to make you eat this food you don't want to eat," says Woods, who owned goats for 12 years before she tired of their indiscriminate pooping. "It doesn't do right by the animal itself."
Still, the little goats have passed a state environmental-impact analysis and received the go-ahead from Seattle's public-health vet, provided owners confine them on the property and pasteurize their milk. Don Jordan, director of the Seattle Animal Shelter, says he doesn't anticipate the kind of problems that doomed the pig fad. "It's our opinion that folks who are going to own these kind of animals are likely well-educated on the nature of the species," he says.
