Glad to hear this story will have a good outcome. Typical battery-type white-egg-layer (commercial Leghorn), alas... They usually get kept in cages here and the brown-egg-layers typically get kept in huge floor flocks, several hundred strong, which of course is too many for any sort of pecking order to become established so it's just constant turmoil. I bought a 'spent' brown-egg-layer out of such a commercial flock for a dollar and my only request was that she have sound legs and that her clipped beak was at least partially grown out. The chicken guy cheerfully took me upstairs to the attic where his flock was being kept so I could chose one for myself and we basically opened up these big communal nest boxes until I found a hen that would do. The conditions were grim, a real survival of the fittest situation, with weak birds being picked and dead ones lying in the corners being cannibalized, but it was still better than the cages. The stronger birds who'd regrown their beaks were actually in half-decent shape. By the way, disease is actually one thing I don't worry about with birds like this and neither did their owner. They're vaccinated up the ying yang at the hatchery and this particular flock was only a week or so away from becoming cheap chicken nuggets anyway.
I took my 18-month-old dollar hen home in a feed sack and popped her straight in an empty outdoor run with her own food and water. She'd never been outside, had never felt a fresh breeze, had never seen the sun or the sky. She basically crouched stupefied for a good hour, then seemed to come to life and started taking notice of the other chickens prowling around outside her run, with a couple of the gnarlier, older hens growling at her. Before the end of the day, she'd picked over her whole run, had taken her first dust bath, and had done some sun bathing. She was fine to run with the rest of the flock within a week and held her own just fine.
Chickens have a lot of basic instincts which never die no matter how abysmally they're kept and battery hens IMO are always worth trying to save. Sadly, I remember reading once about how to acquire spent commercial hens for free, and volunteering to catch any escapees during the flock's end-of-life transfer to the trucks was one of them. Sounds like fate volunteered the OP to catch this thread's particular escapee. They should all be so lucky...
I took my 18-month-old dollar hen home in a feed sack and popped her straight in an empty outdoor run with her own food and water. She'd never been outside, had never felt a fresh breeze, had never seen the sun or the sky. She basically crouched stupefied for a good hour, then seemed to come to life and started taking notice of the other chickens prowling around outside her run, with a couple of the gnarlier, older hens growling at her. Before the end of the day, she'd picked over her whole run, had taken her first dust bath, and had done some sun bathing. She was fine to run with the rest of the flock within a week and held her own just fine.
Chickens have a lot of basic instincts which never die no matter how abysmally they're kept and battery hens IMO are always worth trying to save. Sadly, I remember reading once about how to acquire spent commercial hens for free, and volunteering to catch any escapees during the flock's end-of-life transfer to the trucks was one of them. Sounds like fate volunteered the OP to catch this thread's particular escapee. They should all be so lucky...
Good to hear she is in good hands!
