Question: Do you own any chickens of your own ? If soo how many and what are their names ?

Louise Pendry answered on 19 Mar 2010:

Hey Tinyterror,

Not at the moment. I used to have two called Miss Mabel and Miss Constance and I sometimes go and see two chickens that I rehomed ages ago called “Christine” and “Cheeky Beaky”. I would love some more chickens though – mine were brilliant. I taught them to do agility and they could use the cat flap (not so good!)

One of the downsides of working in animal research is that you are often not allowed to keep the same animals at home as you study in the lab. This is because of the biosecurity risk. It costs alot to run an experiment and some lab animals are very expensive and irreplaceable if all the lab’s animals all die (as they are ‘different’ from normal animals e.g. they might have a special gene for obesity that allows animals to study the effects of drugs on weight gain, so scientists cannot just ‘buy some replacements’ from the farm or petshop down the road).

My work doesn’t do anything like that but my experiments still cost alot of money to run. If I had chickens at home and they got bird flu I might accidentally infect all my chickens (and everybody else at work’s chickens) and that would not be good 🙁

But if I ever stop working with chickens then rescuing some more ex-battery chickens is very likely 🙂
http://www.bhwt.org.uk/ This is a charity that rescues hens – you had lots of questions today – this might help answer some of them!