Posts Tagged ‘Cold’

Woolly jumper weather…

The weather has been a little bitter recently to say the least.  For one woman, the time had come to protect her chickens from the icy weather by knitting woolly jumpers for each of her 1,500 chickens.

Jo Eglen from Norwich works at the Little Hen Rescue Centre in Norwich and thanks to Jo 5,750 battery chickens have been re-homed and saved from their tortured and captured lives.

Eglen still had to worry about a further 1,500 chickens, but her solution was to knit each of them woolly jumpers to save them from the cold – now that is caring!

A little help from her friends…

Eglen didn’t of course manage to knit all the jumpers herself, but instead asked the local community to pitch in and give her a hand, and they ran to the chicken’s rescue.

After a life-changing trip to a farm, Eglen had an epiphany and the teacher and mother of two started to turn her attentions to caring for the shunned birds and providing them with some solace.

“I went into a battery farm and saw how they lived and died. I just thought it was such a waste of life.

“Some battery farms have up to 10,000 hens of the same age. But when the birds stop or start to slow lying they are sent to the slaughterhouse - not to be used as meat, but just to be culled.

“We know that once they’re out of the farms they start laying good eggs again.  They get quite thin and bald because of the stress and heat. About 60 per cent of the hens that come through are bald,” said Jo.

Everyone has been pitching in…

According to Eglen, people from all over have offered their services to rush to the aid of the freezing chickens.

“We have patterns on our website that are straight-forward and simple. We’ve had 1,500 jumpers come through in just the past two months.  We’ve had so many different kinds - Christmas-themed jumpers, multi-coloured ones, some with bows and stripes,” continued Eglen.

Eglen managed to get hold of the use of some farmland for free through the good will of a local farmer and managed to set up the Little Hen Rescue Centre to care for unwanted battery chickens with a volunteer friend of hers, David Doy.

Could you provide bed and board for a little chicken?

It’s a nice little story, but hopefully with enough people getting the message and feeling the same way as Jo then there could possibly be a number of safe havens popping up around the country for our feathered friends who are all worked out.

What is it with Britain and the cold weather? Every year its freezing and every year we all complain that we are too cold. I had a massive argument with my car today. Yes it may be an inanimate object but that’s no reason not to give it some rather unmentionable names. I stepped out in to what the car told me was minus 8 degrees, and had a look at the windows: Covered in a massive layer of ice - Not a good start to the day, and at 7.20am not great at all.

I delved in the boot and dragged out a bottle of De-icer. Which, the packaging would lead you to believe, would help de-ice the cars windscreens. But no. Instead it left a sludgy, mucky mess all over my windows and barely took anything off. The can was unbearably cold, being captain sensible I’d left my gloves not even in my flat but in another country – I’m not even kidding, I angrily tossed the now “stupid” can in to the back seat of the car, and grabbed the scraper.

To me this is always a bit of a pain for two reasons. 1. You valiantly scrape your completely frozen car window, and due to the amount of elbow grease you’re using, you end up being really hot feeling. Then when you’ve finished scraping you realise that you are rapidly getting colder, and feel worse than you did before said scraping, and 2. what the heck is that brush bit for?

Anyway, I stood scraping the car window for ages. Everytime I scraped a bit of ice off, the sludge from the spray I’d used slip back on to the window and froze almost immediately. Starting to lose the plot, and the will to live, I shouted some more, cursing this weather and rubbishing Halfords for not releasing some kind magic wand that does all this stuff for you.

Finally I started off down the road, peering through a gap that my heater had made in the window – my heater is terrible. As I was driving I accidentally nudged the windscreen wiper meaning that I had now scrapped a layer of icy, sludgy mush across my windscreen blocking my view of the road. I pulled over and had to essentially repeat the process I’d just done – more scraping.

This kind of thing happens every year to Britain. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve seen someone driving around peering through a 2 inch gap in their steamed up windscreen, or driving past someone trying in vain to clear their driveway of snow. I used to prefer the cold weather to hot because I always used to say, ‘at least I can put more clothes on if I’m cold’, but now I want the sun please. Brr…