Thousands of Californian hens have escaped being gassed after an anonymous donor provided US$50,000 for some of them to be flown across the US on a charter flight to a happy retirement on the east coast.
The hens, who have reached the end of their egg-laying life, were due to be killed — a common practice in the US.
However, after an approach from the Animal Place sanctuary in northern California, 3,000 of them will enjoy a comfortable retirement instead. Thanks to an unnamed benefactor, 1,150 of them will be flown to New York to be distributed to sanctuaries in the eastern US.
“It’s certainly the first time this many adult birds have been flown across the country,” said Marji Beach, education director at Animal Place.
Commercial airlines would not accept the 1,150-chicken load, which is why the group had to turn to a private jet company. Beach said the jet company did not seem shocked by the request.
Beach said she was also surprised that the egg farm allowed it to rescue the hens.
“The big battery-cage operations — where the hens are crammed into cages so small they can’t even flap their wings — we just didn’t think they would ever be open to an animal rights organization going to their property and pulling hens, but this person was,” Beach said.
This batch of two-year-old rescued hens is expected to live two to four more years on these farms.
Animal Place has saved 12,000 birds since it started in late 2010, its largest rescue operation saving 4,460 hens.
“If you met a chicken, they have unique personalities like dogs and cats and we think they deserve the same amount of compassion and respect that we give to dogs and cats — I promise we’re not crazy,” Beach said.
An employee from Sasha sanctuary in Manchester, Michigan will make the eight to nine hour drive to New York to pick up 100 birds to join the sanctuary’s collection of cows, pigs and other farm animals.
“It’s going to be a challenge, it’s going to cost us a lot of money, but we’re glad to do it, these birds deserve a chance, unfortunately we can only take a small proportion,” said Sasha director Dorothy Davies, who started the sanctuary in 1981.
Davies said the last time she remembers any rescue animals being flown across the country was after Hurricane Katrina, when shelters took in displaced dogs. She said that it was an uncommon sight and that hens raised to lay eggs are “almost never” rescued.
“I don’t know how they pulled it off,” Davies said.
Chickens raised to lay eggs have a different genetic makeup than birds raised to be used as meat. Once the egg-laying birds lose their ability to produce a profitable amount of eggs they serve no commercial use.
“It’s not your all-purpose bird that grandma had in the backyard — got a couple eggs, had them for Sunday dinner — it’s not like that anymore,” Davies said.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS