{dateline, Pittsburgh, Pa}— The hens are Lu-Lu, Lady Penelope, Dorothy and Trudy. Then there is Scrappy, the aptly named rooster that rules the coop behind Shelly Danko-Day's house in Highland Park.
 
"He has come close to getting his name changed to 'Stew' often," Danko-Day said of the ornery bird with a penchant to dig its spurs into her legs that she has been tempted to make into dinner.
 
Danko-Day is among a growing number of people in and around Pittsburgh who raise chickens. Although there is no official census of urban fowl farmers, people are raising poultry for food and fun in city neighborhoods such as Garfield, Greenfield, North Side and Stanton Heights, and suburbs including Fox Chapel.
 
"I think it's becoming more common than you would think," said Jody Noble, who has raised chickens in Highland Park.
 
Besides producing eggs and meat, chickens help to control bugs and dispose of food scraps, their keepers say.
 
"It's become almost a craze, at least for people raising chickens in the city," said Elaine Belanger, editor of Wisconsin-based Backyard Poultry magazine.
 
Dozens of cities allow residents to raise chickens, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In Pittsburgh, residents are allowed up to five pets, including chickens. Certain zoning variances are required, depending on lot size.
 
Although Animal Control officials could not be reached to verify it, Danko-Day and others who raise chickens in Pittsburgh say neighbors have
not complained.
 
Belanger said she has noticed a sharp increase in the number of city dwellers wanting to raise chickens during the past five years. Her family's magazine restarted in 2005 because of renewed interest and publishes 80,000 copies, six times a year. The magazine has 230 subscribers in Pennsylvania.
 
Danko-Day works for Grow Pittsburgh, a regional organization dedicated to developing sustainable urban agriculture. The group recently started a blog on the Internet for chicken farmers. Other popular Web sites include UrbanChickens.com and BackyardChickens.com, which has more than 20,000 members, including a number of Western Pennsylvania residents who post on its message board.
 
Two to three times a week, Belanger said she receives messages from people looking for help to change ordinances that prohibit raising chickens.
 
Plum officials in October refused to issue a variance for a family wanting to continue raising chickens despite noncompliance with an ordinance requiring people to own at least two acres to raise poultry.
 
Joanna Hohman began raising five hens behind her Greenfield house in July. She grows vegetables and herbs in a small garden.
 
"I think, in the long run, food is going to get more expensive, so I try to grow as much as I can," Hohman said. "I like eggs, and I'm trying to not patronize grocery stores as much. Plus, I can raise (chickens) in a more humane way.
 
"Have you ever seen how they treat those chickens on those (commercial) farms? It's awful."
 
The United States is the world's largest producer of poultry meat, at more than 40 billion pounds annually, and second-largest egg producer, with about 90 billion produced annually, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Large hatcheries can have more than 350,000 hens, the USDA reports. Critics often complain that commercial farms mistreat chickens by clipping their beaks, cramming them in tight living quarters and rarely, if ever, allowing them to roam free.
 
But city life is no walk in the park for chickens, either.
 
"It's tough being a chicken," said Fritz Mitnick, who raises as many as 75 chickens on her 34-acre "hobby farm" in Indiana Township. "Roosters can be nasty. So I wait to see who is the nastiest, then we make soup."
 
Besides hungry owners, common predators include dogs, hawks and raccoons.
 
Mitnick said she has lost about 10 birds to predators, although she was able to save one from a hawk and another from a neighbor's dog.
 
Noble's seven-member brood was thinned out considerably in July, when five were killed by weasels, she said. The same predator later got the two initial survivors, she said.
 
"I've never seen a weasel," Noble said. "But you can kind of tell what's killing your chickens by the way they were killed."
 
Weasels often eat the brains of their prey, and Noble said such was the case with her chickens.
 
Noble plans to get more chickens in spring, and said she will put a door on the coop. --"Live and learn," she said.