Are you a Chicken?

It's all about being a Chicken!

Where I live, in the countryside, I have a view of a chicken shed, they have  a run outside, roughly the size of half a football pitch and so are classed as "Free range". This means when you buy their eggs, you have a happy image of them scratching around in freedom, spending their days happily in the fresh air, hunting for worms and insects, contentedly laying eggs for you and me (as ethical consumers). Evocative hey?

They are entertaining to watch and so recently when they suddenly disappeared, I missed them and their amusing antics.  Then, a huge lorry came and brought a new supply of point-of-lay pullets. After around 3 weeks of being shut in (I assume to acclimatise them) the windows were all opened and they were given a very small run initially, again I suppose to acclimatise them. 

Then I noticed that only about 40 or so were brave enough to venture outside, during a lovely evening walk, we returned home via the rear of the chicken shed, and noticed lots of little yellow beaks, and bright yellow eyes.. I peeked through the window and got the shock of my life as I viewed something very similar to this: 

It was at that point I realised that all these weeks I had been viewing the chickens outside,  there were literally thousands that never came out!  They didn't know that freedom lay just the other side of their shed. The sheds are built with racks/perches that rise almost to the roof with a central walkway (for human access) so all the birds on the left couldn't see the exits to the field. 

Now back to the new arrivals, suddenly they were given access to the entire field, so much room to roam and be totally free range in every sense of the word. Except guess what? They had already become so institutionalised, they didn't know they had freedom to explore further.

 Isn't that sad? I immediately decided that I would only ever buy eggs from true free range hens , those signs outside private houses for example. I discovered a lovely man with a smallholding about a mile away, cycling up to collect the eggs is a total pleasure and at £1 for 6 lovely eggs that were laid that morning, it's cheap too. 

So the point of this blog is to ask, are YOU a chicken? are you looking out from the window of your life, remaining in your house, or the familiarity of a run (school run, work run, shopping run etc) 

It's so easy to lose sight of yourself, to get wrapped up in the demands of modern life, when in fact, there is a whole world...... just the other side of your window.