This summer, Jane Howorth MBE (pictured above), founder of the British Hen Welfare Trust (BHWT), will rehome her millionth hen. Here’s how she did it…

Nearly 30 years ago, Jane Howorth MBE fulfilled a long-held dream of adopting a few ex-commercial laying hens to give them a happy, free-range future. This summer, together with her team at the British Hen Welfare Trust and over a thousand loyal volunteers, she will celebrate the rehoming of the Charity’s one millionth hen.The wellbeing of each and every hen rehomed as well as raising standards for chickens is at the heart of the Charity, and Jane remains the driving force behind its boundless ambitions to help hens everywhere. Here she tells us how it all started…

What inspired you to love chickens so much?
My love of animals definitely goes back to my childhood. Every journey I remember taking with my parents always allowed time to stop so that I could look at the animals in the fields, or stroke a dog etc. But I recall too, that as a child, I wasn’t even aware of chickens as sentient animals, sadly only as something that I ate for Sunday lunch.

When were you first aware of how chickens were farmed?  
When I was a teenager, I watched a Panorama documentary, Down on the Factory Farm, about the living conditions of domestic livestock, which included caged commercial laying hens.

That documentary really opened my eyes to the miserable existence for laying hens and inspired me to help improve welfare as well as our understanding of where our food comes from, specifically eggs.

What was your immediate aim for the welfare of chickens?
I moved to Devon in 2005 and rehomed some hens from a local farm, one of which was Vicky. To this day, she remains a very special hen. She had a condition resulting from egg peritonitis, and developed a penguin stance, looking more like a runner duck than a hen and the other hens immediately tried to attack her recognising her ill health. Vicky had to be separated and that separation led to us building a bond that I had no idea was even possible with a chicken. It really was our fondness for each other and the realisation she had lots of characteristics and behaviours similar to my other animals that inspired me to want to do much more to help these underrated and under-valued little birds.

I then had the idea to put an ad in a local paper to offer others the chance to rehome hens. I originally called it the Westcountry Retirement Home & Re-homing Centre for Battery Hens – what a dreadful name! The ad was so popular and I received endless calls with one at 10pm on a Sunday evening resulting in a few sharp words if I recall correctly! So, in April 2005 I officially launched the Battery Hen Welfare Trust, changing it to the British Hen Welfare Trust in 2010. We’re the country’s first dedicated hen charity.

This article extract was taken from the August 2024 edition of The Country Smallholder. To read the article in full, you can buy the issue here.

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