Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the practice of rehoming ex-battery hens using an on-line forum as a data-base alongside interviews. Rescuing chickens is seen as a challenge to commercial production. It leads to intimate hen-human relationships that can help improve people's mental health and well-being.

Paper long abstract:

The production of chickens for eggs and meat in the UK is part of a vast industrialised system of food production. Welfare standards are pitiful and the lives of the birds short and often painful. This paper looks at some of those who seek to rehome ex-battery chickens whose egg producing lives are over. The personal motivations of chicken-keepers and their relationships with their birds are examined using an on-line forum as a data-base, alongside interviews. There are areas of ambiguity and negotiation, which online forum moderators seek to control, in areas such as the hatching of chicks, the culling of cockerels and vegetarianism. A perhaps surprising result of this study is the extent to which rescued chickens can help improve people’s mental health. There is something about the act of rescuing and the innate friendship offered by many hybrid laying hens, that provide a powerful resource. Intimate relationships that clearly benefit both the birds and their keepers are often achieved. An on-line, international human community is created in which the degree of involvement and sentiment shown by members, both for one another and for their birds, can seem wildly at odds with the normative view of chickens as a mass commercial product.