From a life of being treated as nothing more than an egg-laying machine to joining a free-roaming, well cared for flock, Miss Diva is living her best life after surviving the egg industry.
There was an urgent call out on a local vegan page to re-home 150+ ex battery hens within a 48 hour period. Having had hens myself for almost 3 years now and friends that have chicken refuges, I knew a lot of people in the chicken world. I made some calls and had found homes for over half of them in just under an hour.
My girlfriend and I were both at full capacity when it came to rehoming, with twice the amount of chickens we had the capacity for at home. We decided to foster 7 of the hens, who would be going up to a new home in the north in a few weeks time. We wanted them to hang out with us and our girls, and learn how to chicken!
We brought our 7 fosters home, and opened up the doors of the cages they travelled in. They all stood there bewildered, seeing open grass, other chickens, trees, blue sky, sunshine; all of it for the first time (except for on the back of my pickup truck).
With clipped beaks, and almost no feathers to their names, we allowed them to come out all in their own time, and one by one they surely did, taking their first ever steps forward without meeting a cage wall.
These girls had just spent the last 2 years of their lives in cramped tiny cages, forcing out eggs day in day out, with poor diets, lack of any natural resources, or abilities to practice their instincts. Their poor bodies suffered dramatically.
There was this one girl though. The first one out and the most confident of them all, who was very noticeable from the rest. Her beak had been cut incredibly short; so short I wasn’t sure how on earth she had managed to eat and thrive this far. She had these piercing orange eyes, and she’d stop and pause for a moment to look properly at you, with a tender blink, as if to say “thank you”.
She was the first to try to peck at a piece of cut melon. For the first time ever, she was eating something other than simple grain. She didn’t know how to use her beak to peck at it properly, nor how to grasp a hold of grass to eat, how to eat worms, what blueberries or mangoes were. She got to know all of this within her week with us, and she quickly became her own.