Homesteaders, rejoice! Missouri’s urban chicken movement has taken wing.

Behind my house in the small town where I grew up, a building stood that one could describe as a large shed or a small barn. Under a lean-to roof on one side, the outbuilding had a wooden trough that looked hay-ready.

My family owned no horses, but the house’s previous owner apparently did. No one considered this odd, having a horse in a residential neighborhood.

Burgs of the day did not bother with leash laws, zoning ordinances or even health inspections. If cooks at one of the town’s two cafes smoked while standing over the grill, any residual nicotine flavor probably died with the application of lard.

Missourians have a history of hearty existence, and their lives with livestock intersect. Normally, town folk like some separation from clucking and squealing species, but a trend seems in ascent.

St. Joseph spent years in a sort of civic competition with Columbia, two out-state communities of similar size if not exactly identical temperaments.

As St. Joseph’s population maintained a modest rate of growth, Columbia’s rocketed ahead. The chip-on-the-shoulder crowd hereabouts believes the central Missouri city suffers a late-blooming arrogance. In fact, the rivalry might not be that at all, or at the least painfully one-sided.

With that as context, it bears noting that the city council in Columbia had a discussion last week about the keeping of backyard chickens.

Sit on a board of city governance and rest assured unexpected words will one day come from your mouth. That must have been the case with Columbia’s mayor, Darwin Hindman, who couldn’t quite reel back the sentence, “I am in favor of an ordinance that would allow chickens.”

Ah, but he said it, a remark destined to live in opposition research of the city’s sure-to-burgeon anti-chicken coalition.

As George H.W. Bush once said of Iraqi aggression, “This will not stand.” Enemies of chicken initiatives might feed the same line.

In a tarragon cream sauce, chicken attracts few enemies. Multiple chickens in residential subdivisions might give the area a foul (and fowl) ambience.

One citizen, according to the Columbia Tribune, told the council in chicken support, “You’re going to get eggs, fertilizer and bug control.”

Yes, and also chickens.

While this seems a local oddity, the sort that ignites isolated bickering and widespread head-shaking, officials in another Missouri community, the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, also considered last week a limit on chicken flocking.

Big trouble scratches there. Hens have no lobby.

No cackle is heard in St. Joseph. Chickens are part of a non-prohibited list that includes dogs, house cats and “non-human primates under 20 pounds.”

City codes countenance no “raccoons, skunks, foxes, leopards, panthers” and other troublesome creatures.

Jaguarundis get specific mention in the ordinance, and that law appears to be working. No proliferation of tropical wildcats appears at hand.

Fowl acceptance might be the next great battleground of public tolerance. Ugly rumors would spread of avian flu on one side. Blissful tales of pet chickens would surface on the other.

We can only hope the urban chicken movement doesn’t generate snobbery in the flock, city birds claiming greater sophistication. That’s where they get the name cocky.

Ken Newton’s column runs

on Sunday and Tuesday.