As people who kept healthy happy chickens that laid lovely eggs. We decided to answer an advert in the local paper to buy ex-battery hens. I will never forget that day. We went to this place and the guy opened a huge barn door and the smell that hit us was overpowering. Then when are eyes became accustom to the dim light we saw hundreds of birds packed in dirty tiny cages . The guy gave us the first six and we put them in boxes and left. We were both very quiet coming home.
When we got back we looked at these poor birds some with toes missing all with hardly any feathers pale and sickly looking. We put them in the hen house with the other birds and they just sat on the floor, they did not know how to move around or how to fly up and perch. They stayed in this traumatised state for about a week and then gradually they started to move around and go outside, the hen house where they were no fences they had an three acre field and beyond. After a few months they were integrated with the rest of the chickens, they put on weight grew feathers and started to enjoy pecking around. They laid lovely eggs that tasted far better than any battery egg ever would, and they really liked the company of Murphy our rampant cockerel.
I like to think in our small way we gave them a happy retirement.
The memory of the Battery Farm will always stay with me, and I will never ever buy battery eggs. I don't think any animal should be subjected to being kept in these unnatural conditions.
Some people can be flipant about the way animals are kept but when you see it up close it's life changing.
We all have choices in life, we don't have to accept animal cruelty because we think it's inevitable.
