In response to the story of my office chicken, Canaduck forwarded a series of videos documenting the life of Hope, a chick rescued from a slaughterhouse. All of the text that follows is taken from the descriptions of these videos on YouTube.
07 Jan 2007
Hope is a broiler chicken found outside a slaughterhouse. He’s a runt and didn’t grow big enough to slaughter so they just threw him out in the trash with the remains of other chickens. Our fantastic friend Jason found Hope and brought him to us. He found him just a few minutes before the rendering truck arrived to take away the chicken remains. Hope would have gone in the truck and been rendered, and we would never have known him. Chickens are slaughtered at about 45 days old, so that’s how old he is.
Hope’s first day home (0:51)
Hope climbs (0:30)
13 Jan 2007
This is a few days after Hope was rescued. She is really hungry. Hope loves to eat more than anything else. Broiler chickens are bred to be hungry all the time. Because of her size, she was probably not able to get to any food or water in the factory farm where she came from where she was crammed in with tens of thousands of birds who are bigger than her.
Hope eating #1 (0:25)
13 Feb 2007
Every now and then we give hope some spaghetti because it looks like worms and he loves it
Hope eating spaghetti (0:35)
14 Feb 2007
Hope has gotten so much bigger in one month. We think that he is now about 3 months old, about twice slaughter age. He’s getting really big now, and really seems to be becoming a rooster.
Hope (0:47)
15 Feb 2007
Hope is becoming the king of his roost. Our cats are terrified of him. Hope enjoys being the king. it’s hard to imagine that he was going to end up on someone’s dinner plate or crushed to death in in dump truck.
Hope chasing cat (0:04)
16 Feb 2007
Hope is growing up to be a rooster! He challenges the cats to duels all the time. Unfortunately, these old cats ain’t ever up for a fight. In nature, roosters fight with one another to establish a pecking order. In a factory farm where Hope was being raised for meat, he would never have the opportunity to do that. Chickens in those farms are crammed in sheds by the tens of thousands making it impossible to establish a pecking order. The birds often go insane from this unnatural over crowding.
Hope chases another cat (0:12)
It is impossible to read when Hope is around.
Reading with Hope (0:26)
08 Apr 2007
Hope loves to play with the cell-phone charger. Maybe it looks like a giant worm?
Hope playing with cord #2 (0:19)
Hope learned to crow last weekend and now he does it all the time. This morning he crowed at 5am!
Hope learns to crow (0:29)
13 April 2007
Editor: Hope was taken to live at a farm animal sanctuary.
Hope’s new home (0:23)
There are several more videos in this series. If you’d like to see more, check out Glenn Gaetz’ feed on Youtube.
Love this story. It reminds me of the time a chicken fell off a chicken truck on the highway in front of my mom’s office. They ran out there and rescued him and got inside just in time to see a group of men come back who also saw him fall. I’m sure he would have been that night’s dinner.
They named him Lucky and he went to live on a farm in Newberg where he was the pet of the secretary’s daughter.
Hey again!! Thanks so much for posting about Hope!