Dane County, WI Animal Ordinances: Chickens & Livestock (2026)

103(18), "Small-scale farming," treats animal-keeping as an accessory use layered onto whatever principal use already occupies the lot, and it applies across every zoning district the county administers under Chapter 10. The threshold is blunt: except for domestic pets, domestic fowl and beekeeping (separately defined and exempted in ch. 004), no animal use is permitted at all on a parcel under one acre. Once a parcel reaches one acre, the county doesn't ban livestock but throttles it, limiting animal use to one animal unit per acre.

Ch. 004(20) defines an animal unit as one cow, four hogs, ten sheep, ten goats, one hundred poultry, one horse, one pony, one mule or one hundred rabbits (or an equivalent combination), falling back on the WI DNR Animal Unit Worksheet for anything not listed. So a one-acre lot can support a single horse, but a flock of forty rabbits needs proportionally more acreage under that same ratio. Livestock itself is defined in ch. 004(86) to include bovine, equine, goats, poultry, sheep, swine, farm-raised deer and game birds, camelids, ratites and farm-raised fish; five or fewer equine animals in the Rural Mixed-Use Districts are carved out and not counted as livestock at all.

Beyond the density cap, ch. 103(18)(c) forces any accessory building, structure or cage housing livestock to sit at least 100 feet from the boundary of a Residential, Rural Residential or Hamlet zoning district, regardless of the applicant's own property-line distance. Because Dane County zoning only reaches unincorporated towns that adopted it, none of this touches livestock kept inside Madison or the county's other incorporated cities.