The Pig on the Bike Path
Imagine you work at a medium size city and you get a complaint about a household in the city that is raising a farm animal on their property. The complaint lists smell and health hazards. What type of farm animal are we talking about?! Welcome to Madison, Wisconsin and a hot 2023 summer debate.
Madison, like many urban areas, has an ordinance on the books somewhere in the public health chapter that doesn’t allow residents to raise pigs or other farm animals within the city confinements. This made sense many years ago when cities grew denser and from a sanitary perspective could not accommodate a farming lifestyle within the city. Over time, chickens made their way back to some cities. In Madison, you can enjoy fresh eggs but only from up to eight hens, no roosters on property, and the chicken coop needs to be 5 feet away from a neighbor’s house. How about a pet pig? There was one happy pig, Rudi, by a bike path that you could take a photo next to it and feed it with some cucumbers left on a plate specifically for him.
As a neighbor, I witnessed a hot public policy debate in our neighborhood’s listserv. Once the city learned about the pig, they asked to remove it from the city boundaries. My neighbors were boiling over this issue. Some people were for keeping the pet pig, some were against it. Emails were lengthy, arguments were sophisticated, and entertaining. I wish the pig could read what people thought about him. Unfortunately, the owner was on the listserv and people were reminding each other to stay civil and respectful.
We commonly talk about good public policy serving public interest. But how do we determine what we mean by public interest? Can we tolerate a pet pig in a city that has over 300,000 residents? If one is ok, what is the limit to size and number of farm animals in the city? How do we translate policy debate from chickens to swine?