Ten years ago, a tornado destroyed some of the buildings of the Buckeye Egg Farm near Johnstown, Ohio. The chickens in those buildings were all slated for euthanasia and initially I didn’t think too hard about how that would be accomplished. Turns out it was going to be by starvation or live burial (which was shown on the local news), whichever came first. The facility was giving chickens away to whoever wanted some. A friend mentioned it at work, and just like that I grabbed some boxes, dashed through the local feed store drive-through, and was off to rescue some chickens!
I had planned to get around 15 birds (not that there was much planning involved)--ten for another coworker who had a farm, and since I figured I’d lose a few (they’d been without food or water for a week at that point), I thought I’d end up with two or three. I thought with that number, Steve and I could put something together that wouldn’t require going to Chicken Castle lengths.
It was pretty chaotic out there. I joined a line of cars, and as I was busy punching air holes in the boxes, workers with no English were packing them in, so I ended up with twenty hens.
When I got home, I opened up the boxes on my sunporch (mostly unfinished and unheated with a concrete floor), put food and water down for them, and dashed back out to find a dog crate and maybe a pen. When I returned over an hour later, all the birds were still sitting in the boxes (these were factory farm hens--used to being crammed together, and now starved for a week and stressed by the trip). I took them out one by one and gave each one some water with a syringe, and then they came back to life. Once mobile, they trashed my porch in no time flat--I recently read that the transit time from beak to butt in a laying hen is just 2.5 hours. This I believe. I couldn’t find anyone to take more than the original ten that I had planned to give away, and two did die, so that left me with eight. I had spent most of my Hiram years working with bantams, and I had forgotten how big standard chickens are. A dog crate wasn’t going to cut it.
I brought the ten to be given away to work and they were released for the day in an unused greenhouse. They were quite the attraction and lots of pictures were taken!
I steeled myself for the expense, and went out with Steve the next evening to choose a shed. I figured I’d sleep on it and go out the next day to buy it. It would have been none to soon since by then, the birds were pretty darned perky and finding out for the first time in their lives that they could indeed fly. In the subsequent big cleanup, chicken poop was discovered on the 11-foot ceiling!
Luckily (I guess), a coworker of Steve’s decided she would like the chickens for her farm. She came out to get them, and my life went back to normal. I missed them though. They were starting to act like real chickens before I gave them away. I had thought a life of close confinement would have damaged them, but they seemed completely mentally recovered in just a few days, and I found them quite charming. Both sets quickly started laying again and had good lives. I know at least one of them was still alive in 2007. Even though I hadn’t thought it through, it was nice to have done a good thing.
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