Emma was free, but not from her breeding

When Emma left the breeding shed, the damage humans had bred into her body came with her.

Click play above to listen to me read this article

Hello friends,

Gosh, it has been such a hectic seven days. Between thirteen sick feathered family members needing urgent care, and netting going up left, right and centre, it has been a little hard to keep up.

But I’m glad I finally have a chance to sit down, catch my breath and tell you about it.

Firstly, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has already donated to our urgent netting campaign.

We had such an incredible start and reached 35 per cent of our goal. We have made huge progress with the enclosures, but still have so much to do and I’m worried we will have to stop the work soon when we run out of money for materials.

If you haven’t donated yet and are able to, I would be so grateful for your help. If you have already donated perhaps you could share the campaign with someone who may care. That would be an enormous help. I’ve included our progress video further down, but you can find the campaign here:

https://chuffed.org/project/henhavencrisis

Okay, now onto Emma’s story.

On Wednesday morning, our sweet little black hen couldn’t stand up.

Emma at the vets the day she couldn't stand. Then the following day, feeling a lot worse.

David came to find me with Emma in his arms, just as I was loading carriers for yet another vet run. It has been one of those weeks where it feels like we are living at the vets.

I settled Emma on double blankets so there was less pressure on her legs, and put food and water right in front of her. She looked around with interest and started to eat. Phew. That gave me a bit of hope.

Emma was a mother hen who never met her chicks. She was liberated from an intensive parent farm that produces eggs to be incubated for the backyard hen industry. A lot of her female babies will be living in people’s gardens right now whilst all her male chicks will have been killed. People don’t tend to think of backyard hens as part of factory farming, but their mothers are confined in huge sheds, bred to produce hundreds of eggs and sent to slaughter once they pass their so-called use-by date.

The vet was fully booked, so the lovely nurse, Keira, saw Emma. Sudden difficulty walking can be caused by reproductive disease, with inflammation, congealed eggs or a mass pressing against the nerves involved in moving her legs. Keira gave Emma an implant in the hope that we could get ahead of it, and I brought her home with an appointment for the next morning.

By then, the brightness had gone from her face. She had a fever and she wasn’t eating. The vet examined her so gently, but I could see Emma was uncomfortable. We started antibiotics and pain relief and agreed that, if there was no improvement within twenty-four hours, we would let her go.

I brought her home and settled her back on her blankets. When I checked on her a couple of hours later, she had passed away. She was in the same position, with her head just dropped down, and she looked like she had gone gently.

I stroked her and told her I was so sorry that humans had failed her. We had liberated her from that disgusting shed, where hens came out with balls of faeces caked around their toes and hardened like concrete. But we could not liberate her from the selective breeding that greedy humans had inflicted on her.

Emma was the second hen from that same parent farm we lost this week.

Two days earlier, I had found Lacey sitting alone in her coop and not coming out. She was a beautiful, deep-brown hen, and her face had that look that tells you they are terribly unwell.

There was no space at the vet that day. I brought Lacey inside, gave her fluids under the skin and made her as comfortable as I could. That evening, while I was feeding the pigs, she had a fit and died. David was in the kitchen with her. He rested a hand on her and spoke soothingly, but didn’t pick her up for fear of making her feel worse.

When Lacey first arrived here, she was one of the girls whose toes were encased in hardened faeces. I soaked them in warm, bubbly water for hours to free them. Within a couple of months she had developed reproductive disease, but implants and veterinary care bought her another two and a half years of a really good life with her friends.

Lacey just after rescue with her foot encased in hard feces, after her foot bath and then enjoying her new life

What humans have bred into their bodies

Emma and Lacey were two of thirteen of our loved ones who became sick this week. Twelve went to the vets, several more than once, and the bills came to around $10,600.

The diagnoses were not all the same, but again and again they led back to selective breeding.

A hen like Lacey has been bred to lay up to 350 eggs a year, while the wild jungle fowl she descends from lays somewhere between 12 and 30. From that comes the stress and pain of laying, egg yolk peritonitis, reproductive cancers and masses that press against everything packed into a small body.

We can liberate a tiny number of hens from the horrible places where they are abused. Liberating them from what humans have bred into their bodies is so much harder.

The rest of our little hospital ward

Handsome Prince

Six appointments were for suprelorin implants intended to prevent further reproductive disease. Connie the ex-battery hen, needed hers replaced before it wore off. So did Cookie, our beautiful frizzle Polish girl. You may remember a few months ago, her abdomen was chock-full of horrible, rancid, congealed omelette. Her warm body had essentially cooked the escaped egg yolks and it almost killed her. We must never let her lay again which is why her implants will be done every 4.5 months.

Maura, a sweet little white hen who chats to me in meow-like sounds, needed hers because laying causes her such distress. Mary and Kitty, two curious ex-battery hens who preen my trousers while I sit on the grass, received their first implants after laying soft eggs. Peeka, a surrendered hen with a messy bottom lately, went in for one too. Her best friend Lucy went with her.

Poor Lucy isn’t doing too well after her op. Those awful eggs have a lot to answer for.

Lucy had received an implant a couple of months ago, but her abdomen had become swollen and her breathing was laboured whenever she sat down.

When the vets operated, they removed a mass the size of a mango and drained around half a litre of fluid. Her weight went from 2.5kg before surgery to 1.8kg after.

The vets were amazed she did so well under the anaesthetic and made it through such a big op. I honestly thought she might die that night, so when they rang the next day to say she was perching and bright, I was so relieved.

She is home now on pain relief and antibiotics, in a quiet area with Peeka where they can chat to the roosters but nobody can bother them. She is scratching about and enjoying her days, coming inside at night, although she is a bit off balance. I think she was previously compensating for that mass so now it is gone, she has to learn how to walk all over again.

Prince is a handsome rooster we recently rescued after he was dumped. A while ago I told you how he was on my radar but we simply had nowhere for him. Well, thanks to your donations I was finally able to rescue him and I will tell you more about him in a future story. He went to the vets for something quite different. There was an infection smell coming from somewhere, although he looked perfectly healthy. The vets eventually found it hidden within the folds of his rose comb. He only has that comb because humans bred him to look a certain way. It is less effective at releasing heat and rather good at trapping dirt. How silly are humans to breed him that way? Every day I clean the folds with saline and a cotton bud and he is doing well.

Esme the duck began our week with another procedure on the bumblefoot she was surrendered with years ago. By the time she got to us, the infection had spread into the bone. She is one of our residents who needs constant meds and about twice yearly procedures. This time the vets could work under local anaesthetic, which was far less taxing on her body. She is doing well and is back with Echo, her duck husband. Her story deserves a whole letter of its own, and I will write it soon.

Pamela is one of our older ladies whose appointment became more complicated than we had hoped.

Pretty Pamela before her operation

Pamela has lovely colours and was surrendered to us a good few years ago. She is one of the very few hens I have seen lose her appetite as a side effect of the implant, but perhaps it was something else all along. For more than six months, she has come inside every evening for a supplementary crop feed and a warm place to sleep.

Each day I feel her crop to see whether she needs the extra feed. About a week ago, I felt something fleshy in there.

The vet thought it might be something she had swallowed. I hoped they were right, because that would have been the simple version. But when they opened her crop, they found a hard lump about the size of a large marble, along with smaller lesions that looked like more of the same. They have sent it to the lab.

It looked nasty to me, and I don’t have a good feeling about it. I have seen reproductive cancer spread through a hen’s body before, and I can’t help wondering whether that is what we are seeing again. We won’t know until the results come back. If it is cancer and she recovers well from this surgery, she will stay in her own area with her friend Jen, crop-fed and warm at night, for as long as she is enjoying life.

Three results we are waiting for

We are waiting for results from Lucy’s mass and Pamela’s lump, along with Esme’s culture. She has needed antibiotics for so long that we must keep checking whether they still work. We have changed them several times already, and I am quite fearful of the day when we can no longer find one that works. My fear is even greater due to her incredible bond with Echo. I can’t imagine what he will do when she is no longer here.

I talk about suprelorin implants a lot because they are wonderful. They stop hens laying eggs, buy time, improve lives and have saved hens here. Lacey got another two and a half good years because of hers. But Emma had an implant. So did Lucy. They can buy precious time, but they cannot undo generations of selective breeding.

All we can do is give each bird as much good time as we possibly can.

This is what rescue so often looks like for farmed animals whose bodies humans have reshaped through selective breeding. It is also a very sad reflection of the way humans see chickens, use them and throw them away.

And while all that was happening...

We have also been working flat out on the urgent netting project to protect everyone here from birds of prey.

Thanks to an incredible start from you, the best supporters in the whole world, our urgent campaign has reached around 35 per cent of our $40,000 goal. But donations have now almost completely stalled, just as this week’s $10,600 in veterinary bills has drained our funds further.

The good news is that your donations are already making a real difference. You can see our progress below, and since I filmed the video we have finished another two enclosures. Yay!

It was the best feeling ever, yesterday, when Peter the rooster and his girlfriends got their enclosure back and made the most of it perching, flapping, dust bathing and generally having a ball. All the other chickens here deserve that too and if we can reach our goal we can give it to them, and get back to the important business of liberating animals.

You can donate here: https://chuffed.org/project/henhavencrisis

If you would like to help with our ongoing feed and vet bill costs, you can become a paid subscriber here (if you are not already):

And if you care for hens and have never heard of Suprelorin implants, please do ask your vet about them. All a vet needs to do is order them in, rub a little numbing cream on the skin and implant with a needle under the skin. Just like a microchip. Oh and ask them to add a little glue to hold it in place so it doesn’t fall out. If you already have girls on implants, I would love to hear how they are getting on.

Until next week I am sending you Esme and Echo’s happy duck splashes, Prince the rooster’s most flamboyant dance and the soft clucks of Lucy settling back beside her best friend Peeka,

Love Catherine x
Founder of NSW Hen Rescue
https://henrescue.org