chickenrescue.net.nz

About a year ago Karen and I adopted a dozen rescued battery hens from the SPCA. At the time I found out just how few of the millions of battery hens in New Zealand get rescued each year (the rest being “culled” due to economics). We still get a lot of pleasure from these great critters (and more than a few eggs).

Just recently, I was trying to facilitate the re-homing of some chickens through a community group I belong to. The response I got from people looking to adopt chickens was amazing - with offers to adopt far outstripping the number of chickens available. Other people then asked me if I could help re-home their chickens so I started looking for a smarter way to bring everyone together.

I had seen other mailing-list based services like the Freecycle Network that seemed to work really well. I thought there was no reason why we couldn’t apply the same model to finding new homes for chickens. So I combined my IT background and passion for animal welfare and the Chicken Rescue Network was born.

It’s a very light operation running on a shoestring budget (cheap shoestrings, not those fancy ones with the plastic tips). After two weeks of operation, current membership stands at 41 and at least 19 chickens have found new homes so far. I’m hoping we can grow it to 100’s of willing homes so some of the battery farms might consider offering more chickens for adoption rather than “disposing” of uneconomic production units, as they see them.

UPDATE MAY 07
The Network now stands at over 170 people all over New Zealand and we have rehomed 265 chickens so far this year.