|
 I well remember the first time we put the rescued battery hens on the ground. Every time they flapped their wings they fell over and they kept staring at the sky. They had never had space to walk or spread their wings. In their caged lives, they´d never seen sky.
Twinkle, Airlie, Pam, Heather and friends are ex-battery hens (egg producing hens) who had been crammed into tiny steel cages in a battery hen shed.
Their whole lives are spent in stinking ammonia-filled sheds with artificial light - all for cheap eggs. Now they are free to roam, dust-bathe, and forage for worms.
It makes you sad knowing you can´t help them all. After only a few days they would come running when you called; all 20 of them leaning into the breeze and flapping their bald little wings trying to make themselves get to you faster!
 Some of the hens like Betty and Heather did not have a single feather on their bodies when they arrived others like Twinkle weighed as little as 600 grams, within a short time they had beautiful glossy feathers and had put on weight.
This photo (right) is their first day ever in the sun.Hens love to sun bathe.
 This is the story of Princess (pictured right)a beautiful white rescued battery hen who lives at Brightside. Princess had spent her first year in a tiny cage crammed full of hens at a battery hen farm. When ever she laid an egg it would roll away from her because the cage floor slopes so the eggs can be collected easily. There was also an electric wire along the front of the cage so she can´t try to get her egg back.
When Princess first came to Brightside she was very thin and scared of people.As soon as we put her on the ground she walked around carefully looking at everything, she had never seen the outside world and was very curious.
After a day or two we started seeing her building the most amazing nests for her eggs. The first one was when she found a pile of washing on the old couch outside the door. She had worked out how to jump onto the couch and had used her beak to gather all the washing uncluding our socks and underpants! She was sitting in the middle of the pile carefully raking them around her and had built a perfect nest for her little white egg!
All this within a day or two of being removed from a tiny wire cage inside a shed where she had spent her whole life. Her instinct was so strong that she just new how to build a nest.
Had she spent her whole life up until now longing to build a nest? I am certain she had. The next day Princess found her way inside and up onto my bed where using my doona she created a deep sided perfectly soft and round nest for her egg, again in the bottom was a little white egg. Princess is always surprising us with her lovely nests. She likes to go back later in the day and carefully rake her egg underneath her to keep it safe.
Please don´t buy battery hen (cage)eggs.
|
The Hens