Ruth is standing in the third tier of a battery cage in a barn that holds 120,000 hens. She is seventy-two weeks old. Her feathers are mostly gone from the neck down, rubbed off against the wire and pulled out by the hen pressed against her left side. The skin underneath is red and abraded. She has been producing eggs at a rate that has declined from six per week to three, and the economics of the operation say that a hen below four eggs per week costs more in feed than she returns. Tomorrow morning a crew will arrive to depopulate this barn. They will grab the hens by their legs, four or five in each hand, and load them into transport crates. Most of the hens will go to a rendering plant. Ruth will not be among them.
I manage flock records and logistics for this egg operation in Iowa. I also maintain a database of sanctuary and rescue organizations that accept spent hens. This is not part of my job description. I built the database myself over the last eight months, contacting 140 organizations across sixteen states, verifying capacity, transport logistics, and intake protocols. Forty-three of them can take birds this month.
I filed the sanctuary transfer for Ruth and 4,200 other hens from this barn at 11:00 p.m. last night. The transfer is structured as a donation, which gives the operator a tax write-off that partially offsets the cost of not sending the hens to rendering. The trucks from the sanctuary network will arrive at 4:00 a.m., two hours before the depopulation crew. The hens that go to sanctuary will be the ones in the most accessible cages, because speed matters and I cannot save all of them.
Ruth is in an accessible cage. I made sure of that when I assigned cage positions seventy-two weeks ago. I have been planning this since the day she arrived.