In Chicken Happiness: Rupfi’s Second Life

Sunday, 4:30 a.m. near Braunschweig. Across the manure-streaked floor in the pitch-dark stall of farmer Udo Kathenhusen, six people trudge. They wear blue overalls, masks, and red headlamps. On the bars that run along the narrow space, 850 hens sit — including one with few feathers. Later she will be given the name “Rupfi.”

Still in the dark, one of the activists begins to pluck the defenseless animals from the perch. Quickly and gently he lays them into the arms of the people in protective suits who — when some of the hens cluck and flutter — whisper soothing words to them and stroke their feathers.

Rupfi’s flock is a little over 15 months old, and had lived in Rethen until that morning. They are hybrid animals, name: Lohmann Brown Classic. Industrial goods. Bred to perform at high levels for a short time. They laid six eggs per week. Now their most productive phase is over, and normally the journey to the slaughterhouse would await — a fate of millions of laying hens every year in Germany. But the farmer has a different plan for his animals. Instead of their bodies ending up as cheap soup meat, bouillon cubes, or in a biogas plant, they should find a new home.

A association to rescue chickens

For that, Kathenhusen works with the association Rettet das Huhn (Save the Chicken). For twelve years they have carried out the ex-stallings on his farm. Germany-wide, the 2007-founded association has about 60 members and places more than 12,000 animals each year. The adopters are screened beforehand and commit in writing to keeping the hens humanely until their natural death. This pays off not only for animal welfare. With a weekly yield of three to five eggs they can indeed count on it — but for the egg industry, such a quota is far too low.

Out in the bright glare of the floodlights, a semicircle of several triads waits. Two assess the birds’ eyes and claws, palpate the abdomen, and inspect the cloaca. If they deem a bird healthy, the third person opens the white wire crate into which she has previously scattered a scoop of feed and clicks on her hand tally device. Once ten animals are gathered, she calls: “Box full!” Then two men rush over and haul the crate to one of the seven ready transporters.

Forty helpers were on site that morning in Rethen. The fact that everyone already knew their tasks was thanks to Stefanie Laab. She runs the association and finds new homes for the animals. “The chickens are considered waste, and we can rescue them after use without supporting the animal industry,” she says.

Today, breeding companies such as the Erich Wesjohann Group dominate the global market for laying hens. Through their breeding methods, the hybrid animals can only perform at peak for one generation; no farmer can breed them himself. These hens are used in most organic farms as well.

What still motivates Stefanie Laab? “It is moving to see the chickens discover life. And it is liberating and empowering to be able to do something yourself.”

Some need extra care

Not all the hens from Kathenhusen’s stall are doing well. Sometimes the neck tilts to the side, sometimes the belly is rock-hard, or an eye weeps. Then the call “foster” echoes across the yard, and someone brings the brown-feathered patient into the barn. There, Julia Helmers has set up a table with wound dressings, salves, and drawn syringes ready.

“What’s wrong with you,” she speaks to the chicken that sits almost motionless before her. The leg of the bird keeps buckling. Helmers has been with Rettet das Huhn for ten years. The 45-year-old can sense bone fractures, recognizes shortness of breath and pododermatitis. She also knows that certain eye inflammations are extremely painful for poultry, and a ‘layer egg’ diagnosis — an inflammation of the oviduct — can be fatal without surgery.

The next patient comes into the barn’s “waiting room.” It is the hen who will later be named Rupfi. On her neck and back She’s almost bald, and broken feather quills stick out of her skin on the wing. Apparently she has been pecked repeatedly by her fellow birds in the past weeks, Helmers diagnosed shortly after. But otherwise she seems to need nothing else. She is slated for a new, particularly dedicated adopter. Animals with bigger problems require the care of experienced keepers.

Two animals still have to see a veterinarian that same day, Julia Helmers has decided. A phone call is enough to organize it. The care cases are also housed after a brief arrangement; for some, an operation is planned in the coming days. Rupfi has received a single crate and will travel to Berlin. In the meantime, farmer Udo Kathenhusen turns on the stall lights to clean for the next herd. The air is dusty, the smell of manure intense, but Kathenhusen is in good spirits. “That after two hours all the chickens are outside is the most important thing for me,” says the 56-year-old.

More than just livestock

For him, the collaboration with the association pays off. Although he now does not receive money from the slaughterhouse for the animals, transporting them via a contractor would hardly offset the meager proceeds anyway. “In some cases I even had to pay extra myself,” reports the man wearing a baseball cap. And then the transport workers would simply grab the chickens by their legs and wings and throw them into boxes. “That was a shitty feeling for me, too.”

Through working with the initiative, he has grown himself, says Kathenhusen. How they deal with animals and that they even pay for operations — that is, of course, a crazy perspective for farmers who see hens as mere livestock, which meets little understanding in his profession. Yet he himself is glad that his chickens can now enjoy a second life as pets.

As dawn breaks, the day’s concentrated bustle has given way to cheerfulness or shivering fatigue. Many had long journeys and kept watch through the night to arrive at four o’clock in the morning, to hang lamps, prepare boxes, and hang the signs on the doors of the transporters to indicate how many animals will later be invited here across Germany. But the animals are not yet with their new owners who live all over Germany.

Benjamin Pfab has taken over the tour to Berlin. He himself first got chickens during the Corona period. They changed his life. Through dealing with industrial farming, he became a vegan; he makes an exception only when his chickens give him eggs. The Lohmann Brown Classics still live on average about two more years, he estimates — substantially shorter than old domestic breeds. Pfab will take four hens home later; they should provide good company for his most anxious hen at home.

Pfab stops in a parking lot near the Berlin motorway. With baskets, crates, and boxes, the adopters are already waiting, among them Katja Marx. Excited, she receives her three hens. She, a nurse by trade, is said to be well-suited for these chickens by a friend involved with the association at the handover. Two hens wear green foot casts; the third is the hen heavily battered by her peers. Still in the car, Marx names Rupfi for her.

In her garden, Marx has built a Scandinavian-style wooden cottage with a well-secured run. First she brings the foot-crippled hens to their new home, then Rupfi. With concern, she watches whether the others will attack her. Rupfi looks around curiously, then hops out of her box and begins to inspect the new home — just like her two old barn companions. When Marx offers them dried mealworms, Rupfi is the fastest.

Three months later, her plumage has grown back. The hen had visits to the veterinarian in the meantime, needed to be fed, and spent a lot of time under a heat lamp. But now Rupfi is well. She is calmer than the others, notes Marx, who likes to sit with the animals. “She grounds me.”