rehoming roundup

ONE of the reasons we are celebrating our ONE MILLIONTH hen this year is because of our volunteers … so these pages are dedicated to them.

Our team has grown from one – that was me – to around 1,400 in the past 19 years. Would you like to know how that makes me feel? Humbled, grateful, blown away and in awe of the sheer dedication, the determination and the camaraderie that has resulted.

I would love to name every one of our volunteers but frankly it would make for an encyclopaedia of kind people, although I clearly remember handwriting a thank you to every volunteer when we celebrated our 500,000 hen milestone and that gave me tennis elbow for a few weeks - not to be repeated. So the next best is to say thank you to each of our volunteers, past and present, in this magazine.

My heartfelt thanks go to all of you, and on behalf of every single hen that has been given a second chance in life through your caring hands.

I’m going to throw out some random names – Adele (who’s been with me from the get go!), Ian (who drives wherever there’s a hen in need, and his lovely wife, Mollie), Jean (who made me laugh until my sides hurt when she was hurtling me, another colleague and a van full of hens around London to the TV studios to film the programme with Jamie Oliver), to Karon (who touched me beyond words by giving her daughter the middle name Jane), to Michelle and daughter Ellie, who almost dropped with exhaustion when they took far too many hens without homes because they cared so much, to Sarah (who did a death defying manoeuvre retrieving crates that had come off the trailer across a busy road), to Gaynor who always says ‘yes’ regardless of the task, to all those who trudged in the slurry under a caged unitto ensure we didn’t leave behind a single hen, and to Jilly who always made us happy with her sublime chocolate cake.

Those are just the few I remember off the top of my head within a two minute think – I know there are hundreds of you that I’ve met, thanked, hugged and so many more who have given me tingles and goosebumps all over because of our shared love of hens.

That’s my round-up for this edition of Chicken & Egg. A thank you to the people who have literally lifted every hen from her place of work and put her into a home as a much-loved pet.