There are a few sort of interrelated topics running through this thread.
There is my disgust at Pear Tree Farms and to a certain extent C who got these Ex Batts and my reservations about the whole chicken rescue business.
There is the what is a proper chicken debate.
There is the day to day progress of these Rescues and Ex Batts.
Running through these are various studies and views on which I hope we may come to some consensus that will help with understanding the chicken and why there is a problem in the first place.
There are a couple of things that I suggest are reasonably well established.
Chickens have been around for around 8000 years.
According to people who have studied the history of the chicken along with those who have studied the biology of the chicken, the chicken hasn’t changed much in anything apart from looks for at least 5000 of those years.
Most important is the science says chicken behaviour hasn’t really changed in the 5000 year period either. They’ve been doing the same stuff wherever they been taken.
To know what that stuff that chickens do is, they have to be observed doing it and all over the world there are people who do know what chickens do because the chicken is one of the few domesticated creatures that have coexisted with humans rather than being kept by humans for centuries. The average Asian village kid could probably tell us more about how chickens behave than most studies and that is because of how chickens have been kept in a great many places in the world.
The great advantage, particularly for the poor is the chicken is completely omnivorous and self replicating. You get a couple of hens and a rooster feed them kitchen scraps, perhaps provide them with some form of rudimentary shelter and the chickens take care of themselves. They tend not to wander far from their source of food and water and even with fairly sparse forage they will survive and the hens will lay eggs which the human looks for and collects. Most villages I’ve visited in Asia still have chickens running around free range as do the villages in Africa my niece has visited with her studies and even here on BYC the occasional poster from Iran, or China shows up and posts pictures of chickens living much as I’ve described above. There were a number of places in Catalonia I visited where chickens were kept like this, not even provided with any special housing; they just roosted where they felt safe around the farms and even did this in some of the small towns. There aren’t many other domesticated creatures I can think of that will live like this apart from some breeds of goats.
When I lived in Catalonia I tried to replicate the “traditional” way of keeping chickens, encouraging what were quite highly domesticated breeds to live a semi feral life in order to study their behaviour.
I’ve written lots about them all over BYC but two things were very noticeable. The Marans got progressively slimmer each generation and more broody. The bantams didn’t change much in size but tended to be more feral than the early generations of Marans. The cross breeds tended to be stocky but smaller then the Marans and they also became more feral to the point that they were pro tree huggers in a single generation. They all went broody at least once a year. If I hadn’t limited the number of eggs they sat on I would have had hundreds of chickens. Of course, many would have died through predation but the climate and environment was just warm enough withjust enough forage that should I have been able to continue I would have had feral chicken populations running around the National Park, much like my friend with his Fayoumies.
In 1923 a Mrs Wilmer Steele of Delaware USA changed all this when she developed what was probably the first chicken battery of 500 hens, and about three years later a battery barn for 10000 hens.
Life for the chicken has gone downhill very rapidly since.
Before these events chickens on average laid less than 100 eggs a year. Breeders in the USA set about trying to increase the number of eggs a hen could lay and by the end of the Second World War hens in the USA were laying up to 250 eggs a year.
What doesn’t often get mentioned s the hens life expectancy reduced in line with her higher productivity.
The American battery system got promoted throughout the industrialised countries and along with this came further breeding “improvements” and chicken meat became commonplace where before it had been a bit of a luxury with only roosters being eaten from the hen’s clutches because the unaltered hen would lay a modest amount of eggs for around ten years instead of lots of eggs in her first two.
For many small farms, particularly outside the USA the hen was a low cost regular source of protein and roosters were kept in order for the chickens to reproduce.
With the increasing availability of electric power the incubator superseded the hen and we headed to the situation we are in today where you can pick a chick out of a supermarket bin for less than a dollar I’m told in the USA, that has never seen an adult chicken let alone it’s mother or siblings and will probably never know the life that it’s ancestors had lived for thousands of years before.
Oh, a picture for By Bob because he's moaned about the amount he has to read.
View attachment 2928215
some of them definitely huddle together. But they aren't even all on the same roosting bar when there's clearly still room up there. 
