Rescue & Adoptions

2006 Featured Rescues

Two Leghorns Find Freedom at our California Shelter

Snowflake and Snowball, at only a few months old, were to be euthanized before they came to Farm Sanctuary. However, nothing was physically wrong with these beautiful, healthy leghorn hens. Instead, they were simply going to be killed because the researchers who used them in university experiments did not need them anymore. Thankfully, with the help of a compassionate student/staff person at the university, their lives did not end prematurely. Snowflake and Snowball instead are now happy and thriving at our California Shelter.

Beginning life as an experimental subject in a veterinary agriculture school provided an unhappy start for these intelligent and sentient chickens. Although we don't know the nature of the experiments they endured, we do know that they arrived with "dubbed" combs. This is a form of mutilation where the combs are removed, in an effort to increase blood flow to stimulate egg production. Snowball and Snowflake were lucky, however, for it is common in experimental situations to simply end the animals' lives instead of trying to find someone to care for them when they are not needed in research anymore. All animals used in experimentation are seen as mere test subjects, simple tools of science to be used and discarded after research is completed.

Snowball and Snowflake are also lucky to have full and healthy snowy-white plumage. A leghorn chicken is a common factory farm breed. If they had been raised in an egg-laying facility, the tiny wire cages they would have been forced to live within packed tightly with other hens, would have destroyed their plumage. Chickens in these facilities are packed so tightly into battery cages they are not able to spread their wings or stand upright and the boredom and confinement creates a scenario where the chickens peck at each other, making their situation even more miserable. They are "spent" (no longer in full egg production) after only a few years, and either sent to slaughter for low-grade chicken meat and animal feed or killed and composted, having never laid in the sun, dustbathed or searched excitedly for bugs in a grassy barnyard.

Today, Snowball and Snowflake live with the other rescued hens and roosters; they spend every day as they wish roaming their spacious barnyard and spreading their wings in the sunlight freely and contentedly. These beautiful girls have also been lucky enough to find true love. At any time of the day, both Snowball and Snowflake can be found with Zeke the rooster roaming the grassy yard, pecking in the grass with him for bugs and worms and safely snuggling with him every night in the chicken barn.