Rescue Stories

To many, a small backyard chicken flock conveys the image of an idyllic urban homestead — the very antithesis of the factory egg farm. But for nearly all backyard hens, life begins the same way it does for factory farmed birds, and it often ends much the same way as well.

A trail of blood marked the path from the rescuer’s car to our Melrose Small Animal Hospital.

Turpentine was surely destined for someone’s dinner table. Thanks to a Farm Sanctuary member, however, this handsome fellow is busy charming caregivers and visitors at our New York Shelter instead.

Lucky Lady didn’t earn her name from good fortune at a craps table. Instead, she came by the moniker the hard way. She cheated death in early June 2007, escaping from an auction house and roaming the streets of the South Bronx for hours.

As Farm Sanctuary rescue workers entered the western New York property where Lila and dozens of others languished, they were nearly overwhelmed by the smell of death.

Our friend Nate is one powerful fellow — and our staff has the bruises to prove it. Nate was one of four goats recently dumped in a small town near our New York Shelter.

Late in the 2012 baseball season, New York Mets relief pitcher Tim Byrdak secretly brought a small feathered newcomer into the clubhouse — a chicken he claimed was sent by the Yankees to taunt Mets teammate Frank Francisco, who had been calling the Yankees “chickens” during a subway series run.

This June, a certain backyard bird feeder in a rural setting near Rochester, New York, attracted some unusual visitors.

For egg-laying hens in commercial production, even those on “free-range” farms, life ends between the ages of one and two years.

Just a few days before July 4th, Farm Sanctuary’s Emergency Rescue Team arrived at a factory pig farm where we were alerted to the flagrant abuse of a pregnant breeding sow.