3/12/2024 0 Comments Best squirrel catapultThen again, I hadn’t planned on most of the things that had happened since Covid-19 began. ![]() There were many days when I thought longingly of the protagonist of Ottessa Moshfegh’s book My Year of Rest and Relaxation who sleeps her life away, but caring for my chickens kept me on schedule. I didn’t notice the dread of monotony creeping up on me until I started having headaches from constantly clenching my muscles, and woke up with an aching jaw from grinding my teeth in the night-an old habit I’d stopped soon after I moved out of New York City four years ago. Weekdays and weekends had long ago ceased to have any distinction. I’d even been battling the same patch of weeds for months. Every corner of my large, wild garden-my refuge from the house-was now all too familiar. When Thelma and Louise arrived, I had been in some form of lockdown for nearly four months. I talked to my husband, who was skeptical, but supportive. ![]() Why would chickens be any different? I hemmed and hawed. So it was either adopt now, or wait a year or more to find some ex-batts to join the flock. It had taken so long to find anyone with ex-batts, I’d come to think of it as something perpetually in the future. Sometimes I’d get a response forwarding me elsewhere. Sometimes I didn’t get a response for months. ![]() Every time I found the name of a farm animal sanctuary on the West Coast, I emailed to ask them if they had rescue hens to adopt in Oregon. It involves a lot of phone calls and waiting. While the UK has the British Hen Welfare Trust to facilitate the rescue and re-homing of roughly 50,000 battery hens every year, trying to adopt an “ex-batt” in the United States is a patchwork affair. They had rescued two hundred hens just a few weeks before and had only thirty left. When the call came from Heartwood Haven, I was torn. I had room to breathe for the first time in months. No more supervision (when adding new chickens to a flock, fighting is normal), feeding and watering two coops, or extra cleaning. My chicken chores had suddenly gotten much lighter. I’d just finished raising day-old chicks that arrived in April, who’d finally grown up enough to move into the main coop. By the end of June 2020, I had a flock of eight chickens-nine, until one was re-homed because he was a rooster, chicksona non grata in my suburb, thanks to noise ordinances. What I wanted, more than anything, was to watch these hens blossom from egg-laying machines into birds. Without people to rescue and adopt them, ex-batts would never know life as a real chicken-scratching in the dirt, eating bugs and dandelion greens, dust bathing, and lying in the sun. (The sanctuary couldn’t tell me where Thelma and Louise had come from, not even the state). But sometimes, the rare farmer will agree to let some hens be re-homed anonymously. At about two years old, so-called “spent hens” start slowing their laying and are either slaughtered and used as cheap meat for stews, or simply thrown out because their market value is so low. (Roosters are killed soon after sexing.) Without space to even stretch their wings, all hens can do is eat and lay eggs. The egg industry is hard on the hens who live through it. ![]() The world was too big for them at a time when my world had never felt smaller.įor the last year, I’d been emailing farm sanctuaries asking if they had ex-battery hens, rescues named after the long rows of cramped wire cages in which they’d spent the first two years of their lives. When a group of rescues first arrived at Heartwood Haven sanctuary in Gig Harbor, Washington, its director told me, none of the hens would leave the safety of the shed to walk into the chicken yard. When I looked at her straight on, her face reminded me of someone who’d forgotten to put in their dentures. Thelma’s top beak had been cut so far back it almost went to her nostrils. Both had been debeaked to keep them from causing damage when they inevitably pecked their neighbors. Their combs were pale and floppy-often a sign of poor health. Louise had lost all the feathers on her neck from stress and feather picking by the other hens she’d lived with, during her first two years of life. And, at first, they were sad, bedraggled things. Thelma and Louise are my two rescued red hens. But, I suppose for them, any place that wasn’t the egg farm was just as good as another. Thelma and Louise hardly seemed to notice and put themselves to bed hours before sunset. It was partially shaded by an old hazelnut tree constantly shaking with squirrels. Upon arrival, they walked gamely into their own quarantine accommodations -the small grow-out coop used for chicks. They slept in their cage the whole two-hour ride to our home just outside of Portland, Oregon, where we’d been on lockdown since March. Thelma and Louise were so worn they almost looked threadbare.
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