I’ve been following the activities of our local battery-hen rescuers – Let the Ladies Go – for a while. Every few months they take a couple of thousand chickens from a local chicken farmer. ISA browns lay like machines for a couple of years and then their fecundity tails off a bit – egg producers want to get new, younger hens at this stage. The farmers who supply Let the Ladies Go choose to hand the older chickens over rather than slaughter them.
We’d been thinking about taking some rescue hens for some time, and when Let the Ladies Go sent out an urgent call for help on a sunny weekend when we had no commitments, we took a drive to beautiful rural Cooranbong with a big ventilated cardboard box.
The horde of rescued chickens seemed pretty happy wandering around their giant holding pen in the bush, but the logistics of feeding and caring for thousands of chickens must be mindboggling. The rescuers take the really sick and injured chickens – the paralysed, the totally featherless, the partially blind – indoors to nurse them back to health (with the help of hand-knitted chicken jumpers and chicken nappy pads).  So our girls, like all the others in the yard, were surprisingly healthy, if only patchily feathered and with slightly clipped beaks. We planned to take a pair of chooks home but in the end got talked into taking three, thinking that if one pegged out, the two remaining girls would still have each other for company. But all three chooks – Ruff, Crumpet and Dusty – have made it (so far, anyway).
When they first arrived the girls’ experiences of captivity were pretty visible. I was too disorganised to have their enclosure totally sorted, so when we got back from our drive we plonked their cardboard box, top open, in the yard, while I got creative in my favoured artistic medium – zipties and bamboo. All three of the girls were quite capable of flapping out of their box, but they sat tight for an hour, scarcely noticing that escape was an option. Which was lucky in a way. We wanted to keep our existing chooks physically separated from the new girls for a week or two – although they could suss each other out through the chicken wire fence – until the rescue hens built up their strength.
Over the next fortnight we got to see them learn about the outdoors: the taste of sweetcorn, autumn leaves underfoot, the touch of sun on their feathers.
Eventually, feeling more confident that the rescue chooks weren’t bringing disease to the backyard, we let the two flocks mingle. The new girls weren’t entirely happy to find that their bucolic patch in the sunniest part of the garden was a favoured hang-out of the incumbent chooks as well. In particular, Winter the leghorn, low on the established pecking order, proved to be tyrant. “Winter is coming” …. something strike fear into the heart of an ex-battery hen.
Needless to say, there were ructions when we decided it was time to move all the hens into Colditz, our predator proof cage, recently upgraded with a light-sensitive automatic door. Because chickens are up with the sun, but these humans generally prefer not to be.
Winter was not happy about the girls moving in on her territory. The new automatic door – the world’s slowest and bluntest guillotine – starts shutting when as lumens drop to single digits. The new girls make an effort to get into the cage as the darkness began to gather but Winter stands, beady eyed, by the door. The minute she turns round to head to her roosting quarters, though, they’re in like a shot.
Shima the barred rock hanging out with the next door neighbours
The rescue chooks have settled in now, with only the occasional bit of light argy-bargy. The new girls are even laying eggs – with the lengthening days, we’ve just started being able to give our neighbours the occasional half-dozen. But more to the point, the rescue hens are really charming. They seem quite egalitarian – they get on well as a threesome, and there’s minimal aggro between the three of them and our other chooks. They’re curious and interested in investigating the world around them. And they like people. When I’m down in the garden, they loiter nearby, expecting all of the good stuff. They’re much more sociable than the chickens we’ve looked after since they were week old balls of fluff – well, except for the loveable Apricot.
It seems strange that animals who have been treated, on the whole, quite badly by human beings nonetheless expect fine things from us. Maybe there’s hope for us after all.
More backyard chicken adventures
The life and times of Andy Ninja, the escape chicken
Reflections of a ground predator
Death, hot compost and chicken addictions