El Gato’s Story

Our lovely mascot ‘El Gato’ has adopted her name due to the many lives she has lived and all the pain and suffering she has been through. El Gato in Spanish means ‘the cat’ and this is because this little hen really does have 9 lives like a cat and her story adventured like this.

It was one day, we had prepared to do a 100 hen rescue out of a very large commercial battery farm. We had arrived there a little earlier then planned only to find they were still doing their cullings and the truck was still being filled with dead and dying hens.

Two young men that were on the slaughter truck that day saw us and came over to investigate. They were both new to driving these trucks and had never seen the devastation that happened. One of the young men had tears already welling up in his eyes.

For those of you that don’t know, the process of culling battery hens does differ from factory to factory. However, it is a very hard process to watch. In this particular factory they put an electronic probe down the throat to shock the heart of the hen and then twist the neck to kill them. Each hen is done like this and as there are normally thousands to do at a time it takes many hands, quick hands and not much time to do it. However not all that make it through this process die at the end of it and as they are loaded into the back of the truck to go off to the processing plants they are left to slowly die with the rest of their buddies in the back.

Well on this day the two young men witnessed all this and we’re horrified at the process of live chickens in the back of their truck. After us explaining to them what we were there for (saving at least 100 of these girls that day) they asked if we had room for more. Of course I do I told them, I will always find room, so off one guy goes into the back of the truck, and starts pulling out live chicken, the ones he could see that were still alive and fighting to stay that way.

El Gato was one of these girls. When they came over to my truck I was in absolute shock. I had never seem so many still alive from the killing process and in such horrible shape trying to stay alive. El Gato was the worst of the bunch. When they had tried to break her neck they must have shattered and broke her jaw instead so here she was with her jaw half hanging down and gasping in shock.

I was very thankful for these young guys, they put their jobs in jeopardy to save these girls but we got out another 6 lives that day.

So, El Gato came home where we set her jaw. We had to glue the split with super glue and give her lots of extra tlc. I personally didn’t think she would make it, but my husband Blair was very determined to give her a chance and had faith she would pull through. So after hand feeding her for two weeks and the regular use of super drops for health she made a full recovery and started eating pellets to my amazement. El Gato is now one of the many hens I use to help train the newbies in the process of switching from the battery farm life to free range life. She is our pin up model and a very amazing specimen. We love her positive attitude and she is always going to be one of the main reasons for us to carry on.