Of all the cruelties inflicted on hens forced to live in battery cages, one of the worst, perhaps even the worst of all, is preventing them from standing up on their legs and feet and walking. Unconfined, chickens walk constantly and often pretty fast. And they run!
Listen to Thinking Like a Chicken Podcast, May 7, 2023. Transcript below.
Watching Sarah walk. Photo by Frank Johnston - The Washington
Post
Thursday, May 4th, was International Respect for Chickens Day, an
annual project of United Poultry Concerns since 2005. I take this
opportunity on behalf of that very special Day for Chickens to tell
you something about these wonderful birds.
Now that the weather is warming up, I’ve taken to sitting on the
back steps once again with the chickens on late afternoons. I love
it when they choose to sit next to me on the red bricks on either
side of the steps. It’s mainly the hens who do this, while Kahlua,
the rooster, moseys about nearby. They express absolute contentment,
often closing their eyes, preening their feathers, and expressing
happiness quietly in their voices. Another thing that endears these
hens to me is watching them walking about in the yard on their
sturdy legs. Often they break into a run if something catches their
attention – like maybe one of the hens has something of interest in
her beak and the other hens chase after her for it, in and out of
the trees. The legs and feet of chickens are essential to who they
are and what they like to do. Stuffing hens in cages and in crowded
“cage-free” buildings is a violation of Chickens, however
monstrously legal it may be.
Watching our hens from my perch on the steps, I am reminded of a hen
we once rescued, whose story goes like this.
Sarah came to our sanctuary with twenty or so other hens rescued
from a battery-cage facility in Ohio. They all had missing feathers,
spiny feather shafts and bare body parts. Their eyes had the murky
look that battery-caged hens develop from living in ammonia-filled
air arising from the manure piles in sunless gloom. Sarah was the
worst off. She could not stand up. She had bone fractures that
hadn’t healed properly, and her skin was all but featherless. Our
veterinarian determined she had a broken leg. While the other hens
from her group were soon living outside with our other chickens, we
kept Sarah, naked and crippled, in an enclosure on the porch. We did
not expect her to stand up, let alone walk, or even live very long.
We were wrong.
Over the years, we’ve adopted hundreds of hens straight from the
caged environment, which is all they ever knew until they were
rescued and placed gently on the ground where they felt the earth
under their feet for the first time ever. Because their bones have
never been properly exercised, added to the relentless demand for
calcium for eggshell formation, these hens suffer from varying
degrees of osteoporosis when they arrive at a sanctuary.
The egg industry calls their osteoporosis “caged layer fatigue.”
Affected hens have difficulty standing and spreading their wings.
Their bones are very fragile, often fractured and sometimes broken.
They have a washed-out appearance in their eyes and combs. The comb,
which is the red crown on top of their heads, turns yellowish-white
in the battery cage. Their toenails are long and spindly from never
having scratched vigorously in the ground like normal chickens. Hens
fresh from an egg-production facility look like ghostly ballerinas
exhumed from the underworld.
Over time, Sarah began getting up a little bit on her deformed legs.
She began moving, cautiously, on her feet. Her feathers started
coming back, and her expression changed from lusterless and defeated
to alert and interested. We began letting her out of her enclosure
to move about freely on the porch. One day I brought her into the
house. The personal attention had a huge effect. Sarah became
friendly and assertive. If I was working upstairs, I would carry her
up the steps so she could sit next to me.
One day I ran upstairs to get something and heard a sound behind me.
I turned around. Sarah was on the third step! She stood still a
minute, and then she sort of hopped up to the next step. She kept
coming. She made it to the landing, went into the bathroom, and sat
down behind the toilet. I thought, “Okay. Let her rest there, if
that’s what she wants.” Soon after, she appeared where I was
working, quite animated. I checked behind the toilet, and there was
a perfect egg. This became her routine, her determination to
rehabilitate herself, both physically and mentally. She would climb
the front steps, one laborious step at a time, just so she could lay
her egg behind the toilet in the bathroom next to the second-floor
landing. This was her choice.
Sarah was a hen, remember, who had never known anything before in
her life but a crowded metal cage among thousands of cages in a
windowless building. Hens bred for commercial egg production are
said by their abusers to be suited to a caged environment. Until she
came to our sanctuary, she had never experienced anything normal,
even so simple, yet vital, as walking. Everything she had known
prior to being rescued was designed to defeat her personality and
her will, because the egg industry dismisses any notion that these
“egg-laying machines” retain natural instincts and behaviors (apart
from laying a massively unnatural number of eggs).
Commercial egg producers ridicule the idea that a human being could
have a friendly relationship with such hens.
But Sarah was not defeated. She eventually chose to join the
chickens outdoors where she held her own as a respected member of
the flock, and I was lucky to have had the opportunity to spend
several years with her in our sanctuary before she died.
I hope you’ve found today’s topic interesting and useful. Thank you very much for listening, and please join me for the next podcast episode of Thinking Like a Chicken—News & Views. And have a wonderful day!