Eeney-Meeney-Miney-Mo

As I said a few days ago, animals have been on my mind recently.
It's my own fault.
I shouldn't look on Facebook. Or, perhaps I shouldn't have 'Liked' half the Animal Charities in Ireland on Facebook. Then I wouldn't have to be confronted with the realities of furry life in this country.
The trouble is, I'm not great at sticking my head in the sand, either.

The realities don't make pleasant viewing, by and large, although there are (mercifully) lots of happy endings.
I know there are also lots of excuses for why things are so bad. Ireland has been in the grip of recession for a long time now. People are poor, hard-pressed, struggling to keep things together, losing jobs and homes. And, let's face it, other countries are just as bad...
But actually, the longer I think about it, the more pathetic any excuse seems to be.
This isn't Syria, or the Phillipines. We should be responsible for the animals in our care, and yet animal welfare in Ireland is in a truly shocking state.

Of course, I know there are lots of eejits like me who would give their last crust to the cat (not that my cats would look at crusts); who'd perch on the floor because the dog's got the sofa, and rush outside in a thunderstorm to make sure the outdoor critters have their umbrellas up.

Two happy endings for two Rescues, thanks to ForDogsSake DogRescue and Great Hounds in Need

Bur sadly, there seem to be many, many other people who just don't give a damn. Either that; or they're blind, deaf and dumb, or - worst of all - they actually choose to take out their frustrations and anger on any animal who comes within range.

It appals me to the point of sleeplessness that anyone can willingly harm an animal, yet people do it all the time.
It appals me that people can see animal abuse and neglect going on under their eyes - next door - down the road, and do nothing about it.That people can literally watch an animal die of starvation, or neglect, or injury, without intervening.
And that so few people do the one thing they could do to help - neuter/spay their own. Loads of charities offer vouchers to help with the cost of this simple operation, yet the country is overrun with strays and unwanted litters.

Mayo Cat Rescue has trapped, neutered and returned over 250 stray cats in their area this year. That is aside from all the other rescue work they do. Yet, in truth, as Maureen (who runs the charity) says: 'It's a drop in the ocean'.
If only people would look at the wider picture and see that not neutering adds exponentially to the whole sorry mess.


Considering how relatively small the population of Ireland is (somewhere round the 4 million mark), why is the animal problem so big? There seems much to answer for, and yet so few people being brought to account. And that is despite the fact that in many abuse cases, a whole parish might know what is going on.
Perhaps, worst of all, is the fact that those in an 'official' capacity appear to do least of all. From the government down, they pass the buck round and round while in the meantime, the animal charities have stepped in to pick up the pieces.

There was a picture on Facebook this week of a dead foal lying on rough grass. The photograph showed that the ground all around the poor little creature's feet and body was just a mire - it must have spent its last hours thrashing its hooves - in pain, or trying to get up perhaps. The photo was taken by Animal Heaven Animal Rescue, who responded as soon as they were called, but were too late to save the foal, although they did take its poor mother and 3 other horses away.

A poor dead foal.  Photo: Donna Tier via PAWS Animal Rescue who were instrumental in helping these horses

AHAR is a charity that had already rescued 93 equines and 27 dogs this week, the horses from all corners of the country, both North and south. They have been on the road day and night, responding to calls to pick up horses that were starving, horses that had been dumped, horses that might have been destined for the illegal meat trade (until that bubble burst), horses that are left-overs from the good times when everyone was breeding right left and centre to make an extra buck.
Why is it always the people who are prepared to do something who end up doing everything?

About the dead foal and its mother, a local woman told this charity: 'I have been on to everyone I can think of about those poor horses, from the county council, to site owner, to environmental officer and at the end of it all, hit a brick wall. The final word was that..it all boiled down to money and what it would cost for each horse to be removed to the pound...no one would take responsibility.' 
So a foal is dead, and an un-funded charity takes in the unwanted animals. Again.
What would happen if the charities didn't act until they had the money 'in place'?
They rely solely on donations? What if it's a 'thin' week - as so many weeks are?

I saw another horse picture on Facebook recently.
I couldn't make out what it was at first. I can be a bit dim like that, but afterwards, I couldn't get the image out of my head.

Photo:  Hungry Horse Outside

Were the owners of this horse aware of its condition? The follow-on question is inevitable. If not, why not? They were, apparently, aware of the rescue attempt being made by another of this country's amazing charities, Hungry Horse Outside, but they didn't put in an appearance - then or later.

When I saw the picture, I truly thought the horse was dead, but incredibly she wasn't, and in HHO's care, she is gradually coming back to life, but to quote the charity: 'She is so unhappy, it is heartbreaking. She is being treated like a princess by the volunteers but she has lost the sparkle...she is completely uninterested in life itself. Despite all the love and care...she is unhappy.'
Some wounds don't go away overnight - if ever.

Rachael, well but still unhappy.  Photo: Hungry Horse Outside

Back in September, I was shocked into silence by the state of some of the hens I helped re-home as part of LittleHill Animal Rescue & Sanctuary's 'Great Escape' in which 7000 chickens were saved from a battery. (You can read about it here.) The birds, in just 15 months of life, had gone from healthy young pullets to lifeless, dull dabs of skin and bone, some of them almost completely featherless, a few too far gone to want food, water or even freedom.
A Year in a Cage.
It would make a good title for a play.
Sadly, it wouldn't be a comedy. Possibly a farce. Definitely a tragedy.

Yah Bird after several weeks of rehabilitation. She was almost completely bare to start with

With care and individual attention, alongside those things that hens ought to be able to take for granted - like fresh air, a bit of space, natural light, shelter, somewhere to scratch - most of them are now completely restored to health and well being.
But the battery was re-stocked with another 7000 bright-eyed pullets long since.
It's not illegal, after all.

A typcial battery. NOT the battery in question   Photo: Facebook

Yah Bird now

Not everyone is as lucky as the Escapee hens.
Being a long-dog lover, it's the plight of greyhounds that wrenches my guts. Perhaps the most gentle dog on the planet, the only mistake greyhounds ever made was catching our eye by running too fast. We'd never have focused on them, out of the ordinary, otherwise.

Photo:  Martin Usborne  (seen on

They are bred and bred, always hoping for that one dog who will make it to stardom and earn megabucks, but like everyone else in this world, very few make it that far, and if they do, the bright lights are short-lived.
I'm sure there are some decent racing greyhound breeders out there - at least, I hope to God there are - but the sorry truth for unrecorded numbers of greys is that once they're injured, or past it, they are 'disposed of.' 
For a lucky few, this might mean being handed over to a rescue. For countless others, it means having their ears hacked off at the root (if using a stanley knife qualifies as hacking) being taken to remote woodland or a quarry somewhere and shot. They are tatooed inside their ears, so traceable. Some, God help them, are just left without food or water (possibly muzzled) lying in their own mess in tiny cages, until nature takes its course.

But the possibilities don't end there. Some greyhounds end up on a vet's pristine table, while all the blood is drained out of their bodies. They are then, of course, dead, but the blood is very useful. The dog is not.
Some unlucky dogs are exported to places like Spain where, if that's possible, life as a greyhound will be even tougher than it is here.

The gambling public don't get to see all that.
Would they care?
If the question: 'What happens to these animals?' hasn't flagged itself up in their heads, then probably not. Those who do care don't support the dog racing industry by partidipating in it.

If you want to find out more about ex-racing greyhounds, or join a protest, contact Shut down BelleVue Greyhound race track in Manchester who work tirelessly trying to stop greyhound racing and abuse of these beautiful, gentle hounds.

I'm sure there are lots of people out there who aren't involved with greyhounds. Or mutts. People who stick to purebred dogs because then you are paying for provenance, you know what's what and you can be sure of what you're buying.
It's a nice idea - but can you be sure?
If you have ever bought a puppy, did you see its mother and the place where it was reared?
Did you see anything except the room/office/van the dealer wanted you to see?
If you did, well and good. Hunky dory and tickety boo - thank heavens for dealers who actually breed dogs because they love dogs, not cash. But you surely got one of the lucky ones.
If you've ever bought a puppy that got sick soon afterwards, or didn't socialise well with people, or - worse - died - then start asking yourself serious questions.
For vast numbers of young dogs being sold out there, the truth behind the seller's sunny smile isn't so good.
More pups than you would believe are bred on puppy farms, from worn-out bitches confined for life to breed like machines in small, possibly not very clean cages, until they too are past use.

Don't buy a dog. Choose a Rescue. You'll never regret it - and nor will they. (And that goes for cats too - every animal, probably - though I don't know how many rescued gerbils there are out there...)

If you read my blog regularly, you'll know that generally I'm a pretty positive sort of person who tries to be fairly upbeat about life, but there just doesn't seem to be much 'upbeat' in all of this.

There seems, instead, to be no end to the ways in which people can make a dog suffer.
Meet Charlie.
Charlie was found one winter's evening in a ditch. It was a miracle anyone saw him at all, really.
Julie, from Offaly SPCA, climbed down into the cold water and mud and somehow managed to pull him out. It was quite hard work because he was half dead, had almost no fur, was covered in injuries and was sticky and greasy.

Charlie, in Julie's car after being pulled out of a ditch  Photo: Offaly SPCA

It took umpteen baths with warm water and gentle hands to remove the coating embedded in Charlie's skin.
Perhaps fortunately, almost all the rest of his fur came away with it, revealing bites, holes, wounds...
Between them, the vet and the charity volunteers worked out that it was -cooking oil. Old, sticky cooking oil, like a pan that isn't ever washed, just used again and again. It's not uncommon, apparently. If you smother a dog in cooking oil before using it as bait in a dog-fight, it makes the whole thing so much more entertaining and fun. Of course, it doesn't stop the dog being bitten and savaged. In fact, it probably winds the attackers into more of a frenzy, because they can't get hold of their prey properly.

What a great world we live in.

It took months for Charlie to get better. The wounds got better soon enough, with treatment. The continuing baths got his skin back to normal function, and eventually his fur started to grow again. But the other wounds? Do the wounds inside ever totally go away? His foster 'mum', and now his permanent 'mum' have brought Charlie over the threshold into a new world where he knows happiness and love, but who knows what goes on inside a dog's head. I have had rescue dogs all my life, and the ones who have been really damaged, no matter how happy they become, are only every a shadow away from their memories. All you can do is keep the shadows away.
Fortunately, love is great for banishing shadows.

Charlie today - loved and part of a family   Photo: Offaly SPCA

Charlie sporting a rather splendid hat - his best friend's tail!   Photo: Offaly SPCA

Charlie's story is bad enough, but sadly it's only one of many. And some contain a different kind of horror.
The tale that is snaking round every lane and down every chimney in these parts at the moment is something I can barely bring myself to think about.

There has been a courtcase, apparently. (For once.)
Someone eating in an ethnic restaurant in a town close to us found himself chewing on something that didn't 'chew'.
Apparently, it proved to be a microchip.
Which, apparently, proved to belong to a dog stolen from the other end of the country.
It is grotesque, but turning away and pretending it isn't happening doesn't make it go away.

I couldn't run an animal charity. I'd be too involved with every case I was called to. I'd never be able to let an animal go. I'd worry myself sick over every creature I hadn't been able to help. I'd lie awake even more than I do, haunted by the horror stories. But thank God for people who do run them. They work tirelessly, they face ignorance, brutality, cruelty, abuse and neglect on a daily basis, but somehow they maintain a positive outlook and keep going. They are on call 24/7 with nothing that could remotely be called a routine, or a social life, or a planned 'day off'. And far from being paid, most of them are up to their ears in debt.

What happens when their credit runs out? Do they play 'Eeny-meeney-miney-mo' about who gets rescued and who doesn't?

As I am writing this, the wind is raging out of the north, hurling hailstones at my windows. Winter looms on the horizon, racing up behind us, snapping at our heels.Thank God my dogs and cats are all in, snug in their beds, dreams of supper dancing in their heads, a warm fire kicking in the belly of the stove. The hens are in their henhouse, huddled together on the perches, their heads under their wings.

But what of the creatures up and down this country who have no one and no where?
Eeney-meeney-miney-mo.


Two friends and I, in a small attempt to help animal charities throughout Ireland, have started something small, which we hope might grow. We are all creative people - art and craft people, sewers, knitters, photographers, and we thought that if we could add value to anything we could give, it  might be worth more.

We've called our venture Creating Creature Comforts because that's what we do - make things that, we hope, enhance life. What we'd like to do is sell some of the things we create in order to provide some basic creature comforts for needy animals in the care of Irish Rescues.  Anything that we can give to help towards food, shelter, medical treatment and finding permanent homes, has got to be better than nothing.

A lot of people in Ireland these days - especially artists and crafters - don't have spare cash to give, but they might be willing to give something they create. I've been knitting and crotcheting patchwork blankets for just this reason. One-off colourful throws for a sofa, playroom, nursery, TV chair, petbed...

Handmade throws for sale. €65 each plus p+p - of which €25 will go to an Animal Charity (approx 38%)

What do you make?
We'd love to hear from you if you'd like to join in. The idea is to offer items - singly or in bulk - for sale, and give a minimum of 25% from each sale to one of Ireland's hard-pressed charities (which leaves the producer money to pay for materials etc). If we can get this going, maybe we could even feature a 'Charity of the Month', and highlight what they do while raising a bit of cash for them. It goes without saying that we don't want anyone who already gives to a charity to stop doing so - this is something completely outside that loop. We hope that maybe, by coming at the same problem from another angle - people looking for crafts, gifts, cards etc - we can even get more (and different) people thinking about the animals around us. Who knows?
It's worth a try.

The first project we are undertaking is a 2014 calendar. The photographs are by Martina Killian, and feature the animals on her own smallholding. The pictures are warm and often amusing and represent the side of life we all need to focus on - animals living the lives they ought to be living.

You know what they say, big oaks etc - everything has to start somewhere. You may already have bought a calendar, but hey!  Put one in the loo, or the kid's bedroom, anywhere, and help us raise money for animal charities in Ireland. €5 from each calendar will be split between Sligo Animal Rescue - you've got to start at home! - and LittleHill Animal Rescue and Sanctuary, the charity which brought us together to form this small endeavour.

A website is on its way, but for the moment Creating Creature Comforts is on Facebook, and this blog.


You can contact us on: creatingcreaturecomforts@gmail.com or by leaving a comment below.

Please buy a calendar and help us create more happy endings  - it will be great reminder throughout next year of how things can be for animals if we all work together!
We can re-write the old rhyme:
Eeney-meeney-miney-mo
Catch a Rescue -
Don't let go!

Some pictures from our 2014 Animal Charity Calendar

Calendar €10 plus €3.00 p+p (we can post worldwide)
To pay via PayPal or a card, go to the Buy Now button in the right hand column of this blog, near the top of the page.
Or go to Creating Creature Comforts Facebook page and use the link there.

Thank you for helping.

Indian Summer

October cornflowers

Today, for the first time, there was a real autumn chill and dampness in the air first thing. It was still and grey, and hinted that perhaps our long, lovely summer is drawing to a close.But now I feel as though perhaps I dreamt that. It is warm and sunny again, I've just picked a bunch of cornflowers and paused to admire the pansies and cyclamen in the courtyard bed. And I've been working outside all morning in my shirt sleeves again - gardening, inevitably. Determined to get all my projects finished, my rooted rose cuttings planted, and my bulbs in today, because tomorrow I will be back at Clare's house.

Cyclamen and pansies

I've been helping my friend Clare to create a garden out of the desert of gravel which came with the house. It's great fun, and the hard work has been completely mitigated by the group of like-minded friends who have pitched in with every tool they own and dug, trundled barrows, measured, levelled, painted and heaved alongside me. It's not hugely big, the garden, but it's on a slight incline, so nothing is straightforward, but hey! - after a hard day's work, she has a little patio!
Joy!
But also a lot of stuff lying around.
And piles of mud.
And sand. And gravel.
And a vast heap of trip-hazards - like wooden stakes and trellis.
Hmmm.
Still - I guess it's a start.

I want to get it finished before autumn actually does kick in.
The trouble is, it feels like - what? - late August, early September? Some days feel like July.
It's been one of those blissful summers when time has seemed largely immaterial. The parasol has been up in the courtyard since June, the dogs' sunbathing beds are left out more often than not, and the table outside the backdoor is so much in use, it is covered in clutter.

I haven't caught up with real time yet, but the truth is, we are not far off half-term, and, almost unawares, the Models and I are gently slipping back into our term-time routine. I found myself looking anxiously at the New Girls this morning, trying to gauge how much their infant feathers have grown since yesterday. Not much is the answer, but they are coming - slowly. They will need them soon. I may even have to knit them little pinafores like these dinky ones I saw on Facebook a while ago.

Not my photo or my hens, but a great idea. Thank you, whoever posted it on Facebook

The trouble is, my knitting needles are still full of pole warmer. The one I knitted for Beltra Country Market two years ago has faded to oblivion, turned to a crisp in the teeth of the wind, hail, rain and sun it's been subjected to, and looks decidedly travel-stained from all the passing traffic on the road. However, the new one is nearly finished, and I think there might even be some of the neon orange yarn left over.

The new pole warmer is growing every day

Would the Yah Bird like neon orange, do you think? Jil, our Wwoofer loved it - and looked stunning in her wonderful neon fleece. It was all the rage in Paris too, so you never know. It might be just what the Yah Bird needs to set her up in the world.

Jil and SuperModel at the beach

It's been a great Wwoofing-summer. Apart from the lovely Jil, we had Chloe back for another visit which was wonderful. So lovely to see her again and catch up. She helped knit a bit of the new pole warmer while she was here, and trimmed lots of box hedges, and did a hundred and one other things in the garden. We spent long, lovely, sunny days out there together, chatting, laughing and catching up as we pottered about and weeded the vegetables. We went to a Garden Festival in Galway one glorious Sunday while she was here, and had a great day wandering around Claregalway Castle grounds, surrounded by flowers, food and families enjoying themselves.

Claregalway Garden Festival in July

And there was Marko - and Olivia and Marie Christine. It seems like years ago that they were here, sitting in the Moon Garden knitting, chattering away in Canadian French to each other, interspersed with regular cries of 'Oh-oh! Something weird...' when they'd either dropped a stitch or accidentally created several new ones.

Perhaps it is the end of the summer. It must be or why else would I be looking back over months of memories and sunshine. But it's lovely to have so much to look back on. Paris; several visits to Suffolk to see my parents; the haze of ivory lace and sunshine that was my brother's wedding; the In-Charge's Mega Birthday complete with bunting, balloons and marquees; all the Country Shows we went to, the gardens we visited; our trip to Dublin... Not to mention walks on the beach, the Great Rescue and subsequent Hen Central, SuperModel suddenly starting to grow up, the garden looking the best it's looked for years.

Hens are family, not food. Hens are family, not food. Hens are family... Hens are family...but very tasty NOT food

Actually it will be nice to have a rainy day or two, so that I can sit down and catch up with everything. Look at all the photographs I took and perhaps even record a few of them on these pages for posterity.
But don't get me wrong - I'm not wishing for rain - heaven forbid!
I've still got too much do get done outdoors for that.
I've to finish clearing the bank and planting.
And Clare's garden isn't nearly ready yet. There's a raised bed to raise, an archway to put up, stones to be removed, compost to be hauled, trees to be planted, roses to be put in, bulbs to be bulbed, plants to be positioned, a shed to be painted....

Better scrub that line about a nice rainy day or two.
I am NOT even thinking about rain.

When Will the Caged Bird Sing?

It was the silence that got to me first of all.
Standing there, in the sudden dark of an autumn evening, chilled through from the north westerly gale, I was stopped in my tracks by the silence.


I stood and looked into the back of the horsebox, at the exhausted girl who had voluntarily driven it for 7 hours that day, at the handful of people gathered with me in the cold, dark car park.
I suppose I had expected a healthy amount of noise, once the tailgate was let down.

Katja, Ronya and Fionnghuala - still smiling at 2am after an endless day. Little Oisin had fallen asleep in the car

I hadn't expected towering stacks of cardboard boxes.
I don't know what I had expected, I hadn't really thought that one through, but when I heard the silence and saw the piles, some collapsed at angles that boded nothing but ill, I knew time was of the essence.

I think everyone felt the same, because without a word, we all set-to with grim determination to help unload as fast as possible.
The cartons, as we lifted them down, were hot in my hands. Too hot.
'I didn't know what to do,' Katja said. She was distraught. Exhausted and distraught. It was her second Great Escape run in a week, bless her. 'I wanted to stop half-way to check on them, but I couldn't have re-stacked them on my own - I thought I'd just better get here.'
'You did the right thing,' I said, but the tension in the car park had gone up a notch at the sight of so many faceless boxes, everyone silently wondering what we would find inside.


Involuntarily I thought of those desperate transports that had fled as many Jewish children out of Germany before the last war as possible. It was perhaps an inappropriate analogy - these were not children - but in animal terms, it was a similar situation.
In this case, 7000 one-year-old hens about to be slaughtered for no reason other than their age.

I was in the car park that evening because a friend of mine had posted a picture on the Internet of the birds she had adopted several days earlier. From her I learned that LittleHill Animal Rescue & Sanctuary, hearing of the hens' impending doom, had frantically rallied volunteers and support wherever possible to try and save as many as they could.
3500 had already been homed (my mind boggles at the amount of work that must have been), and now they were doing it all over again in an attempt to snatch the rest from the inevitable. They had been given a few extra days grace.

Even her wing feathers are bare

Everyone pitched in, even Katja's small children who had endured an endless day shut in the car, poor loves.

Inside the boxes, hens were crammed together, sometimes two in a box that I wouldn't have put one hen in for half an hour, let alone a day. Needs must, they say, when the devil drives, and the Sanctuary hadn't packed  the cartons, the farm had.
In the half-collapsed pile we found a sorry mass of feathers at a train-crash angle, and gently, carefully lifted them out one by one. The poor little creature at the bottom was dead. The hen the box had caved onto was dead too, another - unable to move - lay gaping silently. But sad as it was, it was only two fatalities against so many saved.

Everyone was shocked beyond words at the condition the birds were in. Not from their long, unavoidable drive to freedom, but from their brief year spent entirely in caged captivity.
No daylight. No space. No dignity.
I'd fondly thought that caged egg production was now illegal in Ireland. But it seems that's only on paper. It still exists, they've just changed the parameters. It's legal because they are now 'Enriched cages'. Enriched with what, I wonder? Extra birds?
By law, laying hens now have 750 sq cm of space each. EACH - oh joy! All that room to spend their entire lives in. It used to be 550 sq cm each, less than the size of an A4 sheet of paper.
So now it's a page and a half - nearly.
But it's not just Ireland. In much of the world - and large parts of Europe (France, Spain and Poland included) nothing has changed at all.


There was no conversation in the car park after that. It was just: 'There are two in this one,'
'Six in here,'
'I'll move these four.'

The children collected up the sad little eggs that, despite all, had been laid in some of the boxes.
Nature's unstoppable process adding an unavoidable stress to the day. Most birds like to sit quietly and calmly to lay their eggs.

Was she supposed to be an oven-ready chicken, or a laying hen?

I don't know how long it took us to unload all the hens, to distribute them as gently as possible into the various cages and pet carriers that people had brought with them, counting them out between the vehicles - 48 for this van, 25 for another.
'Please take some more,' Katja begged. She sounded close to tears. 
Nearly 300 birds had been brought up in the horsebox that day.
They were the lucky ones. It was only possible to rescue birds if people had offered them them sanctuary amongst their own small flocks, and three and a half thousand had already been homed the previous week.
I took an extra 10, anxious that the temporary pens at home wouldn't be big enough.
'Don't worry,' the In-Charge said gruffly. 'It'll be The Shelbourne after what they're used to.'

Driving home in the cold, windy darkness, rain skirling against the windscreen, we were still silent.
I - a wordsmith by trade - devoid of words to exorcise my horror.
I was grateful beyond expression that the In-Charge - without needing to be asked - had driven me there,  was driving us back, as slowly as possible through the narrow, winding roads while still trying to hurry our pathetic cargo to a safe haven.

My birds don't even look like this when they're moulting

At home, we carried the cages up into the hens' paddock. The tail-end of some far-away tropical storm was lashing gusts of 80kph at us, and the rain was horizontal, but they weren't out in it for long. Carefully we placed each bird into the freshly-strawed pens I had prepared earlier, cuddling them up together in the low stone sheds that have stood, backs braced against the north west wind for nigh on two hundred years.
31 traumatized, many featherless, sad and hopeless little creatures.
I went back an hour or two later, before falling into my own bed, to check that all was well.
They were exactly where I'd placed them, huddled together, heads under their scratchy, frayed, tattered wings. Sleep was doing it's magic, and what they didn't know was that tomorrow would be the start of a whole new life.
A life! Up until now they'd only had an existence.
I went to bed warmed by the knowledge that up and down the country, thousands of hens had been similarly welcomed into homes where they would be treated as hens, not egg-laying machines with a sell-by date.

In the days since then, I've spent a lot of time moving in slow motion.
They are easily alarmed, and aren't used to people, even people scattering food.
They aren't used to food for that matter, unless it is delivered in pellet form, under their noses. They looked at the lettuce I put into their pens as if it might attack them. Green is not a colour they recognise. How sad is that for a hen?
I've taught them how to drink out of water bowls. They have only ever pecked at a drinker to get water, never had the pleasure of dipping their wattles into a full bowl of fresh water, never gone from puddle to puddle in the rain to see which one tasted best. Jil, my lovely wwoofer, and I spent an hour that first morning, gently holding each one and dipping its beak into the bowl to show them how - to try and overcome the inevitable dehydration of the day before.
They have started to scratch about in their pens to see what lies beneath the straw - with claws that are far, far too long because they've never been worn down by normal living.
They've started to realise that there is space to move about in.
And when the rain ever stops, they will discover that there is a whole world beyond their window - a world that contains grass and small beetles, flies to chase, dogs and cats to stare at, sunshine to bask in, dust for delicious baths, morning and night to shape their days, and shelters to rush under when it rains. 

Wondering if the lettuce will attack

In the days that they've been here, I've spent a fair amount of time in tears too.

Some of the hens - none of mine by the luck of the draw - have had to be destroyed because their skeletons were so deformed from living in a cage that they couldn't stand or walk. Some because their rear ends were torn open, possibly by the hens squashed into the cage with them. 
Some because the rescue was just too late.
But the little hen that got squashed on the journey is slowly making a recovery, it seems. She doesn't plan to miss out on her new, gift-wrapped life!
There is hope everywhere.

The emergency refugee tents have a slightly Heath-Robinson appearance

For me, there are few things as upsetting as the eyes of an animal or bird that has no reason to live.  
Those were the eyes that greeted me that first morning as Jil and I set out to help them learn what are, after all, only the basics of survival. But already, just a few days later, their eyes are different - eager, anticipating, anxious sometimes too, but interested - alive.

Life begins at 15 months!

Their new lives will soon envelop them and, being hens, they will probably forget how they spent their first year. With luck they might live to be nine or ten. We don't cull our birds because they no longer produce eggs - I believe in retirement for the animals on this property at least, even if the owners haven't a hope in hell of getting there! We've had hens who'd no longer recognise an egg if it hatched in front of her and danced the hokey-cokey.

But I will not forget. I will find myself constantly wondering how it's possible to call ourselves civilized when we allow our food to be produced in this way. 
Wondering how many more battery hens there are, living their miserable existence, in this country alone? There shouldn't be a need for the LittleHill Sanctuaries, the Bryonys and Katjas of this world to spend their days and nights helping hens escape. They should be at home with their kids.
I never have to buy eggs, but if you do, next time - please question where it came from.
And inform yourself what some of the terminology means. 'Barn Eggs' for example sounds so nice - but is it? Barn eggs means industrial sized sheds in which the birds - not in cages, admittedly - are packed in 9 to the square metre. Space? Daylight? Fresh air? What are those?
Act. Do something. Vote. For God's sake, vote in the way that really counts. With your decisions, with your wallet, with your feet.

What a difference a day makes