Hens find sanctuary with students

Four hens who knew nothing but being crushed into cages the size of an A4 piece of paper are getting a new lease of life at purpose built Chicken Motels.

A group of Opunake High School students in South Taranaki started a sustainability project to produce free range eggs to minimise packaging and using fossil fuels for distribution.

They decided they couldn’t bear to adopt free range hens after finding out there were ex-battery hens – hens kept in tiny cages, standing on wire mesh, as an egg factory – needing homes.

‘‘It’s something we’re all passionate about, saving animals,’’ Brydee Hunt, 14, said. ‘‘We wanted to make their life a lot better.’’

The four hens arrived last Monday, donated from a rehabilitation centre in Mamaku, near Rotorua.

Brydee said seeing pictures online hadn’t prepared them.

‘‘It was quite emotional to see them. It was quite a shock,’’ she said. ‘‘One has no neck really, all her feathers are gone.’’

Kiana Kahukaka, 15, helped build the house and said the chickens felt at home straight away.

‘‘I thought that they were going to be all nervous...but they were so good. They were quite curious about all of it,’’ Jack Osborne, 14, said.

The hutch has been done up with recycled materials – from hanging CDs for the hens to play with, the trampoline-frame run, a campervan septic tank (cleaned and sterilised) that catches rainwater, to glass doors from the school and plastic used during renovations for insulation.

The chickens live in their house and attached run until they get used to moving around and can go fully free range, with two ‘role models’.

‘‘They teach them how to eat out of the little trays; eventually they’ll teach them how to nest up in the ladders. They’ve never experienced that before,’’ Brydee said. ‘‘They all love it; no one’s getting pecked at by other hens.’’

The hens have their own wool jumpers to keep them warm until their feathers grow back.

‘‘It depends on the hen really, we’re not going to pressure them into wearing the jerseys if they don’t want to wear them. They can choose what they want to do now,’’ Brydee said.

The students clearly adore their new charges, who live across the road on land that belongs to a teacher. The kids also blog to encourage others to do the same thing.

‘‘What’s wonderful from the educational side of it is, this is being the change we want to see in the world,’’ deputy principal Andrea Hooper said.

‘‘At the end of the day we felt like we’d changed the world, even though it was only for four hens,’’ Brydee said.