To show you what your free range egg providers really look like?

[StridTheKiller]

That's all. Rescued a dozen ladies this weekend, ex-free range chicken farm hens. The photo shows the rest. Vile trade.

A good bet would be find your local Allotments. Most will have multiple chicken keepers who sell their excess eggs to help pay for feed and such.

Rats are not a huge problem with chickens provided you have a good feeder where it’s chicken activated as such rather than just a bowl of feed on the floor.

Remember though all chickens even a singular one will need to be registered come October.

Wow, that is the worst case of mites (probably, I’m not a vet) I’ve ever seen. How is she doing now, I’d love to see photo?

That’s her feathers growing in, have used wormer and mite stuff. Have attached a photo taken the day I got them

The charity Compassion in World Farming have some great information on their website about how to make the best food shopping choices. Here's the page on eggs:

www.ciwf.org.uk/your-food/eggs/

This is a useful link, however surely they are only the 'best shopping choices' assuming that income isn't a limiting factor. Some people will not have the same choices to start with.

It's true that a lot of 'organic' and 'free range' hens are not left to roam pastures all day and instead, will probably be packed into a barn with a small door to the outside which many will not know how to use.

I've been keeping rescued hens for over 12 years and some of them look almost oven ready when you collect them i.e. no feathers apart from on their head and neck. That said, the feathers do grow quickly and they soon learn how to be chickens!

If anyone is interested in rescuing hens, the British Hen Welfare Trust, Lucky Hens (based in Wigan, NW England), Fresh Start for Hens, and Give a Hen a Home - plus lots of local groups that can be found on FB - all advertise when they have a rehoming day.

Hens are low maintenance and a joy to keep. Not to mention giving you lovely eggs each day.

Why do people vegans expect animals to live forever? When some carcass washes up on the beach, everyone gets in such a tizz. Those chicken are old, raggedy, and haven't had a good moult.

I only keep bantams now.
Sourced locally, the males are used for breeding
I would never buy eggs from a supermarket

Oh how very sad, those poor chickens. How lovely of you to rescue them ❤️

To be fair, Aldi and Lidl are on the award-winning list 🤷🏻‍♀️

We've taken rescue chickens from 'big' places and they were dreadful. We've taken them from a smaller local farm and they were a lot better.

Interestingly, big places tend to get rid of the chickens by the time they are around 18 months/2 years. We've had chickens still laying when they are 4 (albeit a bit slower.) If you are thinking of rescuing chickens and you are a new chicken keeper, I would advise getting some help. Mainly because it's a lot harder to get them back to health, teach them to 'chicken,' separate them if they are pecking each other etc. For a while, this currently lot couldn't work out to use the water drinker, so they had to drink from a plastic tub until they worked out how to use the drinker.

In addition, I think the rescue chickens aren't as clever as normal chickens. We for many years, kept rare breed chicken to try and keep the old fashioned animal going instead of the modified breeds. They didn't lay an egg daily but were very good natured. The rescue chickens aren't that clever. Now, you could certainly argue that having lived a terrible life, they do have to learn new things. But I am now of the opinion (after many years of keeping chickens) that the big breeders encourage stupid animals- they won't get bored, won't cause trouble etc. Don't get me wrong, they are smashing chickens but they aren't inquisitive and clever like the old breeds. We will keep taking rescue chickens over the old fashioned breeds now as we have the experience to look after them.

Ours are currently outside under my apple tree digging up the grubs. So yes, I'm fine with eating their eggs.

I haven’t seen The Lakes egg producer (organis) and packer (free range) on any of the welfare lists, but their website looks great. Maybe they are just overlooked because they’re quite a small, regional supplier. Does anyone know if I need to be worried about their animal welfare standards?

Thank you, OP. I am shocked. I thought that rescue hens in that state were from battery farms. How can they be in that state if they are truly free range?

Is there a label that guarantees proper welfare?

Ahem, speak for yourself! I'd rather spend time with my ladies than most people
😂

We also have rescue hens and were particularly shocked my our last batch (one tiny, terrified, skinny girl only lasted a few days, poor thing - and according to the rescuers a very large proportion were in too poor a state to even attempt rehoming).

If anyone wants a proper shock, go on the RSPCA website and look at what the minimum space requirements are for commercial "free range" hens. Do people imagine them romping merrily around a grassy meadow, like they do on the egg boxes and adverts? Well, they absolutely don't do that. Plus they're kept in absolutely enormous mega flocks which is incredibly stressful and unnatural. Ever heard of the pecking order? Imagine trying to sort that order with thousands upon thousands of birds. Impossible and utterly cruel. Probably a good thing that egg laying hens are all culled at c. 72 weeks old (when their average productivity starts to drop ever so slightly) - barbaric as that is, I think the life they are forced to live is worse. And what do people think happen to all the useless male chicks...? The cute fluffy Easter chicks we all love to see? Yeah, gassed or macerated alive.

It is devastating what we do to animals in the name of "agriculture" and how disconnected and clueless the majority of the population are when it comes to how are food is really produced. Don't get me started on the mammals...

Mass production of anything appears to be detrimental to both animals and the environment.

These chickens are in an atrocious state. Producers that get their animals into this state should be heavily prosecuted. Why are they not more rigorously regulated and monitored?

'free range' doesn't really mean much. It just means they have a few inches more space and a flap where they can go out into a wet muddy yard - chickens don't want to go out into a wet muddy yard so they stay inside and pull feathers out in frustration.

Chicken keeper here. Free range chickens can involve barned chickens just able to move about I think, so not caged, free ranging.

So free range may not be outside, in the fresh air all of the time, or at all. But this differs from enterprise to enterprise.

To also put it in perspective, I’ve rescued huge lovely girls, all fully feathered, as were all their hundreds of sisters, from an organisation which regularly rescues chickens, on more than one occasion.

And some chickens go through a huge moult, the first time this happened to one of my girls, she looked like a fresh or frozen chicken running around the garden, I was horrified, but it’s normal.

Another factor is that farmers get rid of their chickens when they stop laying so much , which is when they also first come into moult.

They will start laying again, when their feathers grow back.

There is always one of these ill advise posts, when people first get their rescue chickens, but it’s not always how it appears.

Natural life span for cow is 15-20 years yet they're slaughtered around 18 months.

Sheeps, pigs and chickens can live for around 10 to 12 years yet we kill them when they're weeks and months old.

They're treated like a crop rather than living beings. It's quite sad really.

I would recommend buying barn eggs rather than free range. Free range are shut in for part of their life (or most of it with avian flu around). They have little space indoors as technically they have space outdoors, although many hens choose not to use this.

Barn chickens have more space per bird and enrichment in their sheds, and the sheds typically seem more chilled and certainly less dusty than the free-range sheds.

Exactly - there will be a whole swathe of people who have never seen or do not know what a lentil is. We are talking about people who cannot read or write, have been brought up in the most awful environments.

How do you stop the fox eating them?

I do hear the comments re COL, but there are plenty of filling and healthy animals free protein sources which are WAY cheaper than meat and often even eggs - beans, chickpeas, lentils, tofu etc. Nuts and seeds are great but have become more expensive (we do a bulk shop of these from Aldi and it keeps us going a while). If people substituted these in for a few meals a week it would make a huge difference. We treat commercial animals poorly to keep up with the demand for cheap and accessible meat - that's the trade off and it's on all our collective conscious. Do we think people through history have eaten meat at almost every meal as some do today? Of course not, before intensive factory farming this wasn't possible for most of the population, and it certainly didn't come shrink wrapped in plastic from a supermarket.

I find sometimes folks just aren't open to this because it's hard to break habits of a lifetime. We were mostly all fed meat by our parents growing up, we have the same expectations and change is hard.

I hope you have the same compassion for rats, mice, spiders, slugs, infant flies (maggots), moulds, fungus, bacteria - all the other living beings we share the planet with.