Our chickens are ex-battery, so it’s fair to say in the first 52 or so weeks of their life, they had a pretty miserable time. When we took them on, we thought they might come with a few problems - not being able to perch properly, not knowing how to use a nest box etc. But they caught on really quickly. I didn’t forsee just how much of a toll their first year of life would take on them though.

We lost Cynthia earlier this year, God rest her little soul, after a six month very gradual downward spiral of ill health. We suspect she had Lymphoid Leukosis, and as such in the end nothing could be done. But this is something any chicken can fall foul of. However, both Pattie and Yoko have developed a condition known as sterile egg peritonitis. It’s basically where their reproductive system malfunctions, and the egg doesn’t go where it ought to. Somewhere along the way, the yolk and sometimes the albumen (egg white) get deposited in a cavity in the abdomen. The chicken feels the urge to lay, and gradually fills up with egg yolk and ascites.

Pattie has only had this condition for a few months, and her ascites is very watery - so easy to remove if need be. Yoko on the other hand has had sterile EYP for almost a year now, and over the past few weeks has ballooned enormously. She waddles like a duck and has to sit down a lot. Of course, we wouldn’t let her go on if she was suffering too much. In the winter, she managed to reabsorb a heck of a lot of the fluid in her abdomen, and look relatively normal. But now in the midst of summer, her ‘laying’ is regular, so we’ve had to step in to try and stop her laying altogether. The method we’re using is called photoperiod manipulation - basically we put her to bed early so she only has the equivalent of winter daylight hours. She sleeps in a converted cat carrier filled with a deep bed of straw and tilted up at a slight angle. She’s perfectly fine with it and has her own luxury accomodation in the top bedroom of the house. She started sleeping in there because both she and Pattie needed the nestbox, and Yoko being the naturally tall, large bird that she is would fill our henhouse nestbox. So the temporary solution until Rich builds the new henhouse with extra large nestbox and shallow ladder (she can’t manage the appalling steep ladder on our hen ark), she’s in her mobile home at night.

We’ve also been battling with a reoccurring illness of Pattie’s. She’d excessively drink and then be lethargic and off her food for about 2 weeks, before recovering after a course of baytril. But it keeps coming back. The initial fecal test results were negative, and her bloods revealed nothing untoward. We were sure it wasn’t linked to her EYP, and so sent off another fecal sample. This time it came back showing that she had a low level of worms (not uncommon, but will require worming with prescription Flubenvet), Candida (a yeast) and coliform bacterial infection. I think we may have isolated the cause, so she should be on a week’s worth of Amoxycillin to try and wipe it out. Apparently coliform in the guts is nigh on impossible to prevent - if it’s going to happen, it’ll happen. But I think we need to step up the hygiene stakes - more poo runs, more scrubbing of the henhouse and making sure they don’t step and spill their feed everywhere. I just hope this is it…we’ve had non stop chicken-related illnesses since last October and I’m spent.

Maureen is the little wonder hen. She has started her first ever moult, and hopefully she’ll finally get shot of her baldie head and realise her full potential. She’s been a reliable little hen, tiny but weighs a tonne, unfailiningly perfect in her egg production and frequency. It’s just now I worry because all the problems with the others started after their moult…

The majority of problems with my ex-batt hens have stemmed from what I believe to be the way they’ve been bred. You see, battery hens aren’t designed to live past a year. All the industry cares about is cramming the birds into cages, getting them to produce unnaturally large amounts of eggs on minimal food input, and then whatever happens after their time is up is not the industry’s concern. So here people like me are picking up the pieces, trying to give these hens the life that they should have had all along. It makes me so angry that the battery hen is still very much in existence. Around 20 million of them alone in this country, a place with supposedly some of the best farming practices in the world. So goodness knows how the other billions (literally) of chickens are forced to live. When you get to know them, see their individual characters, how quickly they adapt to behaviours they’ve been denied, and how friendly and sociable they are, then your heart feels a bit heavy. My ones and their freed friends are the lucky ones.

So next time you’re at a supermarket, check the label. If it lists eggs, but not free range eggs, put it back. Even if you don’t think the product could contain eggs, egg white or egg yolk, still check, you may be surprised. Write to the supermarket and tell them it’s not on. Consumer power will change things, but we’ve got to realise what we need to change first.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 12:59 pm and is filed under hens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.