Chicken Run Rescue

Finding a new home for a chicken

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Vegan Hen Sanctuary in Minnesota

Mission:

Chicken Run Rescue fosters an evolution in critical thought about who is food and who is friend through rescue, rehabilitation, sanctuary and education. Help all animals by adopting an animal free diet. Help individual chickens by adopting them as companions.

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OUR RESCUES NEED HOMES, NOT JOBS!

Every year, domestic fowl, mostly chickens, are stray, abandoned or surrendered in the Metro Area of Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN. These birds are victims of neglect, abuse and abandonment, used for eggs, slaughter, fighting, ritual sacrifice, “nature lessons” or discarded after a hobby no longer holds interest.

Chicken Run provides the birds with love, shelter and vet care. Some rescues are entrusted to carefully screened foster or adoptive homes, most become permanent sanctuary residents. Chicken Run Rescue is the oldest U.S. urban chicken rescue of its kind.

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Chicken Run Rescue Sanctuary provides a home for abandoned chickens. Chickens are the most abused, exploited and devalued land animals on the planet both in unimaginable numbers and degrees of atrocity. Everything we say and do at CRR is intended to validate the birds as worthy individuals and family members. CRR turns the tables and sets the standard of care to the highest level we can.

Our aim is to give them the happiest, newest, cleanest, safest, healthiest, most spacious and aesthetically beautiful homes and gardens to honor them. We want to showcase what the birds have taught us and hope others will step up, rescue a chicken and use our ideas and innovations to make a loving home for them. We cannot help them all but we can help others help them.

Chicken Run Rescue is a non-profit corporation, federally tax exempt under IRS code 501(c)3. All donations are tax deductible as allowed by law.

Who lives at Chicken Run Rescue?

These are the birds who live at Chicken Run Rescue.

What has always guided us in our struggle to change the world for animals, challenge injustice and protect the victims is to stay focused on the individual animal. Truly knowing an animal comes with the daily intimacy of living with them, caring for them in sickness and in health, and loving them for who they are, not for what can be taken from them.

THIS chicken in my arms is the Whole Point. THIS bird, here, before me – not in the abstract, but in the flesh and blood, with a beating heart, eye to eye, with a squirm, a buck-buck and a burble and the warmth of prehistoric toes grasped around a finger. What happens to them matters to them.

CRR is a place of healing and hope. Birds come to us from the darkest despair with physical and psychological scars from confinement, filth, predators, poor nutrition, neglect, abuse and abandonment. At CRR they receive individualized care in an environment that respects their instinctive behavior and individual needs. They get the best avian veterinary care available in the Midwest.

Their food provides for their own health and enjoyment, not for by-products to be taken from them. There is no joy like that of a bird who is experiencing the natural world for the first time in their lives. There is no thrill like watching it happen before your eyes.

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CRR limits the number of birds who live here because we are committed to each and every bird as an individual. Our first responsibility is to the birds already in our care. Each additional bird taken in diminishes the quality of life for all. It is a mathematical reality of physical space, funds and the number of hours in a day it takes to give them the quality care each bird deserves.

In commercial agricultural hells the numbers are staggering. In urban backyards, overcrowding is the most common cause of misery. CRR’s rescues come primarily from birds abandoned by backyard chicken situations. Those numbers are also staggering and increase every year the fad continues. Many well-meaning sanctuaries fail because more animals are taken in than there are available resources for them.

“our curse on them isn’t extinction but proliferation.”
— Karen Davis, PhD, United Poultry Concerns

CRR is committed to teach and assist individuals who want to provide a home for rescued birds on a very small scale. This is accomplished by creating a beautiful and inviting home for the birds as a tribute of respect, as a place where others can see them in a different light.

The quality of life for the hapless birds being raised for food in commercial and backyard prisons is a race to the same bottom line, where cheap eggs, meat and profit becomes a distinction without a difference between them.

Small, barren pens or “tractors” (read: small cages that move around with the bird) are promoted, as are ramshackle “coops” (read: boxes) constructed from “recycled” materials (read: junk) that have less space than a battery cage and are lacking in protection from extreme weather and predators. In both realms, the birds are forced to live in their own overcrowded filth.

The word “farm” is verboten at CRR. Farms do not exist in Nature. They are human creation to serve human purposes. The word legitimizes the prejudice that “farm animals” are meant to be food and are somehow different from other animals. The way “farm animals” are treated lowers the bar for every other harm humans visit on all animals. “Farm” carries with it the mixed message that there are “good farms” and “bad farms” when in fact, the whole concept of a farm is the problem. All animals have the inherent right to bodily integrity and to be who they are, free from human demands.

The key concepts behind the living spaces we design for the birds are based on what is physically and psychologically comfortable for them and an inviting space for humans and birds to share. At CRR, we all live under the same roof. We make creative use of a home environment where we can socialize with them – year-round, safe, clean, in temperatures comfortable for both the Tropical Jungle Fowl they are and the hairless primates we are.

Outdoors, instead of making a place to “put” them, we create spaces designed and sectioned into various gardens that provide the same amenities for ever-changing groups of birds who may or may not be compatible. Spaces are well protected from predators, yet respectful of wildlife. The exceptional challenge is caring for Tropical Jungle Fowl in an extreme climate like Minnesota.

Climate change has made it even more hostile as heat, dewpoints, rain and cold set new records. The birds certainly didn’t put themselves in Minnesota, and we didn’t either, but here we and they are, just the same, so we do the best we can. We roll up our sleeves and do what needs to be done.

NOTE: CRR is a private sanctuary open only to staff, volunteers and invited guests by appointment only. Through our Facebook page, website and hands-on volunteer and foster programs we show who chickens are and what they need to be healthy and happy and about the animal rights philosophy that guides our rescue. We also provide local educational, social justice organizations and like-minded artists with the opportunity to meet the birds.

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