Ethics Trading

As you know by now we have 3 rescued ex battery hens living in our back garden. They’ve been lovely to have and we’ve had regular eggs from them.

Now one is not laying at all – but I’m not bothered about her and I’m happy to carry one as a non laying passenger, after all this isn’t a commercial egg production arrangement. One lays an egg pretty much every day, she has the odd day off but again, that’s fine.

But Red is proving to have some egg issues. She was fine for the first few months, moulted and refeathered beautifully and was laying a regular egg every day, lovely mid brown eggs with some speckles on. But over the past few weeks she’s been laying eggs with shells so fragile that they’re laid pre-broken and of course she is pecking at and eating the broken egg.

This is a huge problem for a flock of laying chickens as it can lead to an egg eating habit which is almost impossible to break – not to mention that Red’s egg production facility is clearly so damaged that she’s now unable to make the shells.

We have decided that we have a number of options.

1. Give her some more time to sort herself out.
2. Cull her before she either does herself more internal damage or she teaches the other 2 to peck at and eat eggs.
3. Rehome her with someone who is not bothered about the egg problem.

To be fair, she’s had weeks of increased calcium in her diet, she’s had homeopathy and we’ve tried everything we can think of and I suspect she is just coming to the end of her egg laying. But it’s going to cause longer term problems if we let her carry on. So she’s had several weeks of option 1 and there’s no signs of improvement.

I’m not willing to cull her seeing as we rescued her so she wouldn’t be minced into pet food. It’s not her fault that her shells are so fragile.

So, we’re rehoming her. I hope she’s happier elsewhere.

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