Celestial

Her head was down when we looked in to her transport crate at the abattoir last night. She looked squashed and nearly dead. We watched through the crate thinking she was dead, until she moved. It was a difficult crate to open, it was impossible to open actually. A bar stopped us from opening the crate out to free her. We had to get her out, but we had to do it another way. I pulled down on the crate top with all my might, whilst my friend reached in to the 2 inch slot to try and get her out. I pulled down on the plastic crate, she desperately squeezed this poor hen through the tiny slot between the crates stacked on top of each other.

This poor girl was so sick, so so sick that when we finally squeezed her through that slot, she regurgitated all her soured crop contents all over me.

Her body was broken. She was weak. She was grasping to every last piece of strength she had to stay alive. As the supermoon looked down on us all, this poor girl was using all of her super power and energy to stay alive. Her name was Celeste (aka Celestial) and she wanted to live.

Celeste was a battery hen. She had lived the 18 months of her life in a small cage with 5 other hens. She just stood there in a cage all day long, in a huge shed filled with other small cages filled with miserable hens stacked on top of each other. We do this to hens so we can eat the eggs their bodies produce. We basically turn them in to no-one, nothing by treating them as commodities.

Sadly we lost Celeste about a week after rescue. We thought she was improving, but she went downhill quite rapidly one morning and decided to head for the stars. At least she experience some kindness in her sad life.

 All around the world, egg laying hens are treated as nothing, as mere waste.