Mo!

She’s a Warren – in other words an industrial chicken bred for laying lots of eggs, then dying from exhaustion soon afterwards. This may sound somewhat strange, and indeed we have absolutely no proof of this other than what we’ve observed from our own birds and those of the small handful of other poultry keepers we’ve encountered.

What can’t be disputed is that she’s an industrial chicken. One of the ways you can tell that from her clipped beak, clipped to prevent her from causing injury to other industrial chickens in battery cages. She’s also small but lays big eggs, so she fits into a smaller space and yet lays stonking big beautiful eggs – that’s also very convenient if you are a battery farmer.

Our limited observations seem to conclude that Warrens live very short lives compared to our lot. Three to four years seems like a good lifespan for one of these little girls, when ours live about ten or so. Basically they are born, start laying an egg every day, almost without fail, then if they don’t get their necks wrung at eighteen months or so because their production starts to drop, they just keel over soon afterwards.

We’re hoping she’ll be at the long end of her natural span and it doesn’t matter to us if she doesn’t lay a single egg for years. We already have one like that – Milly, who hasn’t laid an egg for two or three years now but still helps us with other useful hen functions like digging around for slugs and snails then taking great glee in chomping her way through them.

Mo came to us from some good friends who are not, by any means, battery farmers. In fact, her life has been pretty idyllic on the whole, other than a few traumatic moments outside of the control of her previous owners. In the first place, she was part of a little flock of half a dozen birds, co-owned by two families. One of the co-owners decided that she wasn’t going to be friends with anyone in the village any more so she took her ball home, figuratively speaking, and asked for a hen divorce, selecting three hens and taking them away, leaving our friends with just three birds.

Then, while our friends were on holiday, one of the neighbours was walking her dog on our friends’ land. The dog savaged one of the three, killing it. So, now there were two. Then our friends were in hospital, giving birth to their tiny, very premature daughter Alice, when the same neighbour was taking Maddie (our friends’ dog) and their own dog for a walk, when the same thing happened again. Mo got a bit of a mauling, but was luckier than her companion who died in the attack. To allow a dog to kill one chicken seems, as they say, somewhat careless, but to allow it to happen a second time seems completely callous.

Anyway, our friends decided that their neighbours could not be trusted to control their dogs and that meant that unfortunately our friends could not rebuild their flock for fear of it happening again. So we were asked if we’d provide a home for little Mo, who was frightened and had a lot of missing feathers. We did a ‘mercy dash’ with a cardboard box, brought her home and after a couple of weeks of pecking order disputes and settling in, she’s now a part of the family and we reckon she’s settled herself into the second spot in the pecking order behind Sherri, who had shown no desires to take up that mantle until very recently.

Why Mo? Well, we kind of thought that it was a bit like the Last of the Mohicans – she was the last one left standing so she became Mo.

By another strange quirk of fate, last year, we were in exactly the same spot where we spent a good part of our day today.....Crantock Beach, where DM entertained the waves and the seagulls with his harmonica.