About Me

Hi, thanks for visiting my blog!

I’m Sam – aspiring writer, blogger, and very bad beekeeper. I love my garden, I love animals and I love ex-batts – the tattier the better! I live in the North West of England with my two dogs Roxy and Drew (*a pair of gorgeous old ladies), several hives of bees, an ever fluctuating number of hens, *Hermione, a recently adopted 12 year old blind cat and finally, my husband.

The aforementioned tolerant husband gave me this blog site as an anniversary gift in 2015, the year we weren’t doing gifts! If I’m honest, I think he was probably just bored of hearing, “You’ll never guess what (insert hen’s name) has just done!”. I have a sneaking suspicion that he thought if I could write it all down then he wouldn’t have to hear it every day. Just for the record, he was wrong!

I’ve been keeping hens since 2011. We’d recently moved house and upgraded from a tiny yard to a long, downward sloping garden that had so much potential. Someone suggested hens and I quite liked the idea. On an unseasonably warm October day, with Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’ on the radio, we were driving home with our first four girls Ruby Tuesday, Bluebell, Poppet and Dixie. I said goodbye to these original girls a while ago now but they were to be the first of many. Since then I’ve rehomed lots of ex-batts and a couple of barn hens, and I know that despite adamantly declaring on numerous occasions, “I’m not getting any more hens!”, this number will always be increasing. It started off as a very simple idea – re-home a few ex-battery hens, but what I didn’t realise was that this would not only become addictive, but that it would also become a passion and a cause. I completely underestimated how much these girls get into your heart and it still continues to surprise me.

After keeping ex-batts for  a while and realising what a really rewarding experience it was I decided I wanted to do more. I applied to become a volunteer for the British Hen Welfare Trust (BHWT) and have been involved in helping out on their rehoming days for a while now. At around 18 months of age, hens from ‘enriched cages’ are seen as no longer being commercially viable and are destined for slaughter. Thanks to the tireless work of the BWHT and other charity organisations, hundreds of thousands of hens are saved from this fate and rehomed each year. The BHWT alone  save around 60,000 hens a year from slaughter. To date (18th May 2020) the BHWT have rehomed a staggering 769,069 hens.  Rehoming days bring mixed emotions – emptying cages of hens and helping hundreds of deserving girls start their new lives in retirement is so rewarding but tainted by the frustration of seeing thousands of hens packed into cages, stacked floor to ceiling.  I always go home at the end of the day dirty, tired, aching but knowing I’ve helped make a difference and more often than not, with some new girls to add to my flock!

As a result of the conditions battery hens are kept in, once rehomed their life span can vary from days to a few years. I’m incredibly lucky as I have an amazing vet who not only has specialist knowledge of dealing with the issues that ex-batts are prone to, but who also realises what amazing creatures these hens are. I always find it really hard when I lose one of my  girls but however long their retirement, there is immeasurable satisfaction in seeing hens  that have spent the first 18 months of their lives packed in cages blossom and live out their days with the freedom to exhibit the natural behaviour that the ‘enriched cage’ system inhibits. They deserve time to feel solid ground under their feet, to flap their wings, to scratch, to dust bathe, to experience day, night, wind, rain and warm sunlight on their backs, however short that is.

So that’s me and this is my hen keeping journey, the highs, the lows and the lessons I’ve learnt along the way. My life as a hen keeper so far has been amazing and nearly 10 years on, I honestly can’t imagine not having a flock of tatty hens at the bottom of my garden.

I hope you enjoy the blog posts and I’d love to hear from you – drop me an email and say hello, leave me a comment or find me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

You can also use the link in the side menu to follow my blogs so you’ll never miss a new post!

Sam

(* since I wrote this we’ve had to say goodbye to both our dogs, Roxy and Drew. We still miss them every day but were lucky enough to have had 15 years with them. We also had to say goodbye to Hermione our gorgeous old girl who was only with us for a short time but she was very loved and is always missed. Since then we’ve added two rescue cats to the family – Bobby, a very handsome boy & Jules, (@julesthunderpaws) a ginger polydactyl princess.)