'My chickens are always pleased to see me!' Life with the hen rescuers

In a garden at the back of a house in the North Yorkshire village of Cridling Stubbs, soft clucks fill the air. Three hens scratch and snooze in the dirt, while another two peck at the grass, sporadically wandering up to the door to try to spot their owner. Originally destined for the slaughterhouse after laying intensively at commercial egg farms, Penny, Hattie, Daisy, Annie and Polly are enjoying an idyllic retirement. Charlotte Pacey, 32, who designs play areas for children, says the hens look very different from when they arrived at her home in November 2018. “Penny, Hattie and another hen we called Fleur were so poorly when we collected them,” she recalls. “They were missing feathers, trembling with fear, had pale-looking combs and looked quite sick.” Fleur died after two days, but Penny and Hattie have fully recuperated.
Now they revel in their roles as leaders of the pecking order that was established after Pacey took in three more hens last year. Penny and Hattie are “two peas in a pod” who do everything together, and Hattie plays the role of Penny’s second-in-command, preventing the other hens from eating before Penny does. “They are much more intelligent than people give chickens credit for,” Pacey says. She adds that her hens can recognise their own names and come when they are called. “Once you spend enough time with them, you realise each of them has her own personality.”

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Pacey joins a legion of people across the UK who are giving ex-commercial hens – often ones that have never left the confines of their battery cages – a second life as well-loved pets. Many say that living with chickens has made them reconsider their preconceived ideas . Nicky Cullum is perpetually surprised by what she has learned about Skippy Alice, Little My, Pookie, Button and Jelly. “Many people tell me chickens are incapable of feelings and are purely motivated by food. It’s just not true. I love how they’re always pleased to see me – with or without food. You can often find me sitting in the garden with a book or a cup of tea, with hens sitting on the grass around me, quietly chattering to one another. It surprises me that they even want to be near a human after their previous experience in the factory.”
Cullum’s journey towards hen-keeping was an unorthodox one. It was her son who convinced her to adopt a flock of ex-battery hens so he could look after them while convalescing from a chronic illness. “I wasn’t at all keen, especially when he showed me photos of their poor condition.” She was simultaneously appalled and entranced when her son and husband returned from a rehoming day in Lincolnshire organised by the British Hen Welfare Trust (BHWT), a charity that rescues hens from slaughter and rehomes them through a network of more than 40 regional centres.
Nicky Cullum with some of her rehomed battery hens.

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Nicky Cullum with some of her rehomed battery hens. Photograph: Provided by Nicky Cullum
She describes the hens as skinny, shocked and terrified. They had spent 18 months standing on wire, had never walked with grass under their feet, nor felt the sun on their backs. “At the same time,” she remembers, “I fell in love with their sheer determination to survive, and their immediate fascination with their new surroundings.” As she and her family nursed the hens back to health at their home in rural Norfolk, she decided to document their lives on Instagram; the account has more than 10,000 followers.

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Samantha Hopps, 25, a charity worker, and Ed Tyldesley, 26, a chemistry teacher, also feature their ex-battery hens on their Instagram account, as part of an attempt to offer their followers a glimpse into what a sustainable lifestyle might look like. Their hens roam freely in a sun-drenched chicken run outside their home in Surrey, frequently providing them with eggs, which they use in cooking or give to friends and colleagues. Farmed hens are sent for slaughter when their productivity drops, but with better care, they can still produce plenty of eggs. Hopps, who has been a vegetarian since she was 11, laments the fact that “chickens suffer the roughest lot of most animals. We call them bird-brained and turn them into cat and dog food when they’re no longer able to lay.” Tyldesley adds that they hope to disrupt the idea that hen-keeping is “for really posh people or landowners”. Pacey paid about £250 for her spacious chicken run. “Monthly costs for my five girls” – rescuers often refer to their chickens as “girls” or “ladies” – “are really only for their food and treats, which are between £25 and £30 per month.”
The BHWT asks for a voluntary donation of just £5 for each hen. Under the terms of the 1950 Allotment Act, hens are permitted in allotments – which could be the solution for potential hen keepers who do not have enough space in their homes. The BHWT also says that more of its rescuers are rearing hens on their apartment balconies. Unbeknown to the girls, their post-farm lives have generated a significant amount of interest online. Nancy Birtwhistle, 66, best known for winning The Great British Bake-Off in 2014, is a fervent advocate of switching to an eco-friendly home. Before lockdown, Birtwhistle collected four hens through the BHWT, and has discussed the rehoming process through a series of videos. “I’ve kept hens for 20 years,” she says, “and it’s always been rewarding. They’re also very good for teaching children responsibility, and about where food comes from.” Today, her four rescues live harmoniously alongside four other hens that she jokingly calls “the posh girls”. Life with the girls has altered how and what the hen keepers consume. Pacey and her husband now avoid meat, while Cullum says her entire family is moving towards vegetarianism. “Once I started getting to know the girls better and realised how funny and special they are, it was impossible to see them as just food,” Pacey says. Jenny Carroll, 40, who rehomed a hen called Mavis with a spinal injury, says that her friends and family have become inspired to find out more about compassionate farming. “They’re always asking me how Mavis is doing,” she says. “I feel that if we could all open our hearts to her, we’d also start thinking a lot more about what animals go through so we can eat.”

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Nancy Birtwhistle.

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Nancy Birtwhistle. Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer
Jane Howorth, 60, who founded the BHWT in 2005, has always been determined not to berate farmers, but rather to learn what motivates them and support the shift towards free-range farming. “We make farmers easy to blame,” she says. “Ultimately the consumer has the power to convince them to work differently. If we continue demanding cheap products, farmers are forced to operate in the most cost-efficient way possible. In the end, the animal pays.” Initially, the charity was known as the Battery Hen Welfare Trust, and Howorth was regarded with suspicion when she attended egg-industry events. “I’m a small person,” she says with amusement, “so it was funny to see people step back from me when I went up to them.”
Her attention was first drawn to the plight of laying hens by a 1979 BBC documentary on egg farms. Soon after hatching, chicks are inspected to have their sex determined. Male chicks of laying breed are unsuitable to be reared for meat, so they are often killed immediately. Females have their beaks trimmed so they do not injure one another when they are moved to the cages where they will spend the rest of their 72-week lifespan. “They’re not the cuddliest of animals when you first look at them,” Howorth says, “and it’s easy to treat them as just another commodity.”

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It may come as a surprise that the chicken’s lowly status is a fairly recent development. In Roman times, statesmen consulted a roost of sacred chickens living within a temple complex on important matters, and drew their conclusions about how to proceed based on the chickens’ dietary habits. Treating the chickens badly resulted in terrible consequences. Cicero (106–43 BC) tells a delightfully bizarre tale of how the sacred chickens brought about the downfall of Publius Claudius Pulcher, a Roman politician who commanded the naval fleet during the first Punic war. The pullarius (chicken watcher) reported that the chickens were not feeding when grain was thrown at them, an unfavourable omen for the Romans’ upcoming battle with the Carthaginians. Pulcher scoffed: “Bibant, quoniam esse nollent” (“Since they do not wish to eat, let them drink”) and had the chickens tossed into the sea. The loss of the Roman fleet fell heavily on Pulcher’s shoulders and he was tried for impiety, dying in humiliation shortly after.
Jane Howorth, the founder of the British Hen Welfare Trust

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Jane Howorth, the founder of the British Hen Welfare Trust. Photograph: Simon Moore
Greater interest in hen-keeping might encourage us to question the current stereotype of chickens as dull and unintelligent, and to challenge industrialised farming practices. Of the approximately 38m egg-laying hens in the UK today, Howorth says the BHWT rehomes up to 66,000 a year. “That’s not even 1% – but it was never my aim to do numbers. Neither is it about damaging the egg industry or catching anybody out. It’s about changing a culture of consumption.” Smaller charities such as Fresh Start for Hens are also increasing public awareness of the conditions endured by commercial hens. Throughout lockdown, the BHWT has seen an unprecedented rise in requests for hen rehoming . As Pacey says: “It’s a lovely feeling to have a similar vision – to give these little beings the lives they deserve.”

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