How bald chickens help troubled children

They are miserable-looking creatures. Featherless, off-balance, skittish to the point of terror. Also, incredibly lucky. These are "rescue" chickens, formerly caged as egg producers in an unidentified industrial hatchery somewhere in southern Ontario. They are more than a year old. This week, they trod on grass and felt the sun for the first time.

The chickens are new arrivals at Cobble Hills Farm Sanctuary, a rescue farm about 20 minutes southwest of Stratford. Rescue farms typically save horses or goats or other large animals. Cobble Hills' proprietor, Christen Shepherd, has a few of those. Now she's trying to save these chickens – which are perhaps the most wretched of all. Up until now, they have spent their lives in groups of a half-dozen confined to battery cages the size of a microwave oven. When they arrived here two weeks ago, they had never walked. Or roosted. Or flapped their wings.

Most of them have no feathers, their puckered skin rubbed raw against cage bars. The combs on the tops of their heads – the prime spot where a chicken releases body heat – cover their faces like hoods, overdeveloped because of the sweaty conditions inside the hatchery. At first, they huddled in the corners of Shepherd's coop on shaky legs. They slept piled on top of each other or wedged into cat carriers. The ones who were particularly denuded were fitted up with tiny chicken sweaters, sewn by volunteers. Downy tufts of feathers are already regrowing on most of them.



These chickens are being used as therapy animals to treat a small group of children living in a nearby group home. Four boys, aged 8 to 12, visit the chickens once a week. These are kids in dire trouble, Crown wards so imperilled they cannot be identified in any way lest their own families figure out where they are.

Shepherd thought interacting with the chickens might help teach the boys empathy. "But they were already so gentle with them, right from the start," she says. "They worry if the chickens are afraid or if a sweater is too tight."

Now the kids come because it makes them happy. "They are their own little pets," says Matt Roser, the social worker who arranged for the boys to visit the farm. "They spend all week looking forward to the next visit."

With news video.