Chicken Run

I've kept chickens for about eight years now, mostly rare breeds that I get from local smallholders. Then a colleague told me she was in touch with an organisation that rescues battery hens, when they are "spent", in the industry's horrid phrase, and about to become chicken nuggets, and finds them good homes. The volunteers buy as many hens as they have homes for, from the farmer on his clear-out day, and take them up to someone's house, where the new owners come to collect them.
Anyway, so there I was, in a pleasent street of mock-Tudor semis in Surrey, looking for one particular house. All the neighbours had found reasons to do the gardening, and were standing about watching. There was a sign on the front door that said "Please collect hens from side gate." So I went around to the side gate, and found myself at the end of a queue of cheery potential chicken owners, all clutching various home-made boxes to put the chickens in. We were all lined up at the edge of the patio. Our goal was a summer-house, with a strip of old carpet on the floor and about forty terrifed chickens in the back of it.
When I got to the front of the queue, the dispenser asked me if I'd had chickens before. So I explained that I had, and said that I was a vet.
"Oh, good," she said, "you can take the oven-ready ones, then."
I didn't know what she meant. I do now. See below for pictures.
If anyone reading this buys battery eggs, this is what the chickens look like when they're finished with. I've never seen chickens with such pale combs, or realised that they could lose quite so many feathers. Their chests and vents are all red and sore, whether just from urine scald (as it were) or from pecking, I don't know. Apparently they will recover and improve, with time. For the moment, they're in isolation in half my chicken house, looking very, very scared. They don't know they'd be on their way to the processed food factory otherwise.