Battery Hen Rescue - A "Must Watch!"

[MROO]

Oh My Goodness! Between the visual of these three ladies discovering the world for the first time and the music ... I nearly needed a tissue!

Then there was the follow up, six months later ...

The author of the videos shared this note:
Please feel free to share and embed this video for educational purposes. The chickens in this video deserve to have their stories told and shared with the world so their legacy is never lost.

Note - The second video has an almost accusatory one at the end directed at consumers in general that really doesn't apply to BYC'ers. We "get it" already; 'cause it's one of the many reasons we keep our own chickens in the first place!

 

[Shadowfire]

heartbreaking and breathtaking!

 

[Banditschickens]

 

[varidgerunner]

Looks like a typical heart string tugging propaganda piece to me. Come take a look at my completely free ranged hens when they are molting. They will look just as rough as those. Come back in six months and they will look remarkably better. My guess is that roughly one year later, the ones that were still alive looked about the same. Take any chicken, put it in a cat carrier, drive somewhere and set them down and open the box, and with a bit of careful editing, you could get much the same behavior. Helps if they are tame and used to seeing people, like those obviously were.

 

[MROO]

Looks like a typical heart string tugging propaganda piece to me. Come take a look at my completely free ranged hens when they are molting. They will look just as rough as those. Come back in six months and they will look remarkably better. My guess is that roughly one year later, the ones that were still alive looked about the same. Take any chicken, put it in a cat carrier, drive somewhere and set them down and open the box, and with a bit of careful editing, you could get much the same behavior. Helps if they are tame and used to seeing people, like those obviously were.

I doubt it. There's no plea for help. No begging for money. No accusations leveled at a particular company. Have you ever seen battery hens "right out of the box?" That's how they behave - hiding in corners, picking their feet way up high because the grass feels weird, scratching at the ground and then just standing there because they don't know why they did it. They just know that instinct told them to scratch. And yes, they do look like they're in a hard molt, not just picking. That's forced on them by reduced or no feed when they're "earmarked" for mass culling. I'm no bleeding heart. I know there's a place for the mass-producing egg farmers, too (even though I don't like it,) but we need to give some the benefit of the doubt. Even if this particular rescue was "staged," which is doubtful in my book, the situation still exists. It's good to be aware. And it's good that some people are willing to take on the "disposables" and give them a chance at a real life.

 

[varidgerunner]

My thoughts. The people that own, operate, and work on "factory farms" do so to provide for their families. At the end of the day they are family farmers. Their farm looks different than one 100 years ago, but their are tons of social, economic, geographical and political reasons for that. To feed the world as much and as cheaply as the world wants to be fed, there is a very close margin of error. If all eggs were produced on the model of a free range, back yard chicken operation, losses to predation would be incredibly high, sanitation would be marginal, production costs would be through the roof. If you added in keeping "spent" laying hens until the end of their days, it would be neither affordable or sustainable. It is really a poor use of our resources.

Somewhere in Nebraska a mama rabbit is sad, because her babies got plowed under in some poor farmer's struggle to grow the extra corn to feed those battery hens. A mother bobwhite quail in South Carolina is also sad about her dead babies, because once again, some poor farmer had to raise some extra soybeans to make a little extra protein for the dog food that those hens would have provided.

Everything was born to die. Whether a possum tears into some poorly constructed coop and eats those rescue hens alive, or some baby woodpeckers get pulverized during the wood cutting operations necessary to make a possum proof coop for those rescue hens, animals will suffer and die at the hand of man. Happiness is relative and subjective in the grander scheme.