BLOG – Page 27 – Tamara Kenneally Photography

Angry

He arrived in early June, 2014 in a trailer with three of his Suffolk sisters. When he was let out into a paddock he looked wary. He looked scared, wary and angry….mostly angry.

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Angry came from a small Suffolk sheep breeder who no longer wanted his sheep. These lovely sheep were no longer wanted and if a home couldn’t be found for them, they were headed for the abattoir.

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Angry is a three year old wether who loves his friends dearly, but doesn’t love us so much. We aren’t sure why he is so wary of us, but we do know that time is making him better. I can get closer to him every week and every now and again he gets close enough to give one of us a bit of a bite.

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We also named him after Angry Anderson and sometimes when he’s walking over the field, as the sun is going down, I sing “Bound For Glory….Yes I’m Booooouuund For Glory!”…because he is!

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Please don’t use my images without permission. All images are Copyright Tamara Kenneally

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ANGRY

A one year $50 sponsorship helps keep Angry healthy and happy (as happy as he likes to be!)

It ensures Angry has things he loves every single day! Things like sheep nuts, Vita Weats and mineral licks!

YOUR ONE YEAR SPONSORSHIP ENTITLES YOU TO:

*One sponsorship certificate.

*Three 5×7 inch prints of Angry being a bit angry.

*An email from Angry during the year letting you know what he’s been up to.

CLICK ON THE PHOTO BELOW TO SPONSOR ANGRY!

Ducks Out Of Water (Duck Farming)

When you think of ducks, you automatically think of water. There is a reason for that. Ducks and water go hand in hand. Ducks are an aquatic bird. Their need for water to swim in and bathe in as it is essential for their health and happiness. Duck farming denies ducks of any pools of water to swim in or clean themselves in. Ducks are intensively farmed in sheds and are selectively bred to grow as fast as possible in the smallest amount of time possible. Sheds are not cleaned out until the ducks are sent to slaughter, which is nine weeks from hatching to slaughter weight. Anyone who knows ducks is aware that their waste matter is much more than a chicken’s and the sheds fill up incredibly quickly with duck manure on the floor of the sheds. Ducks walk, live and sleep on manure caked floors that can be more than half a metre thick.

The Australian duck industry slaughters over 8 million ducks for their meat annually and the industry is worth approximately $100 million a year. The Australian Poultry Cooperative Research Centre reports that duck meat production has been increasing at the rate of over five percent per year. Most duck farms in Australia house roughly 50,000 ducks in one farm, but there are certain larger farms that house between 50,000 – 100,000 ducks at any one time.

Pekin ducks are the breed of choice for duck farmers wanting to profit off duck’s bodies. Throughout the industry, they are known as “broiler ducks” and are farmed just like “broiler chickens”.

For the nine weeks they are alive, ducks are kept locked in a shed. They never see the sky or the earth. They never get to immerse their heads, let alone their bodies, in water. They are forced to stand or sit the entire time (ducks bodies are made to swim, prolonged standing and use of their legs holding up their large bodies puts incredibly strain on their legs). They live on mounds of manure.

Whilst visiting the particular duck farm in these images in Victoria, Australia (which is labelled as “free range”), when I first entered the shed, these beautiful ducks ran in terror from me. I proceeded to crouch down on the manure filled floor. I sat there for ten minutes and decided to make my energy as balanced and as calm as possible, and then the loveliest thing happened. Ten thousand ducks all decided that I might be ok. They decided that I wasn’t a threat and they walked up to me and surrounded me. Some talked to me and some just stared. These beautiful young ducks ( just babies, but so huge) were completey covered in duck manure. Their bodies were just caked in it because they couldn’t escape it. They are forced to live in it.

This is the reality for these lovely, aquatic birds. This is what they go through for you to eat their flesh. Nine weeks of hell, living in their own manure, never seeing the light of day, never being able to swim and then being roughly chased, picked up, thrown into a truck, sent to the abattoir and slaughtered.

Whilst at this farm in 2014, I took three ducklings away with me. They were about three weeks old but really quite big for their age. I took them to Lefty’s Place and now they are huge, happy ducks who relish in swimming in their water all day long.

Their names are Templeton, Fern and Charlotte and they are free for the rest of their lives. They are the lucky ones.

In 2018, I visited a duck farm once again and took three ducklings with me – Legolas, Merry and Pippin.

* This series is an ongoing work in progress

Please don’t use my images without permission. All images are Copyright Tamara Kenneally

Bowie

Is there life on mars? We believe Bowie thinks so. We believe Bowie actually lives there in her mind. She is our odd bod chicken.

Bowie was found starving to death in a free range egg farm in May, 2014. She had somehow escaped the hands of workers when they came into the shed and picked up the other 60,000 hens and threw them in the truck bound for slaughter. I first saw her cowering in a group of other starving hens, up against the shed wall. These hens were left with no food or water and the sheds doors had been left open, so predators could come in and eat them one by one. They would have been left like this for at least at least a week.

4web — *Bowie is the hen right at the back, with her head turned to the right.*

Bowie looked like a starving alien when my friend picked her up and made her way out of the farm with her. I picked another hen who looked to be her friend. We didn’t want to separate them, so we took them together. I got Bowie (and her friend Pepper home) and I have never experienced a hen more terrified than Bowie. She was so afraid. She would not let me get near her. Her panic was more than any cage hen I’d ever rescued. I’d pick her up and she would cry out in horror and I literally thought she was going to die of fear. You see, in a free range egg farm, submissive hens have nowhere to hide. A chicken’s hierarchal system is very complex and there is a pecking order. In a flock of 60,000 the pecking order would be absolutely all over the place, chickens would have to re-establish their places daily, which means submissive hens would be attacked daily and with nowhere to hide, their lives would be lived in constant fear.

8web — *The emptied shed where Bowie was found.*

She took great comfort in her friend Pepper. They never let each other out of their sights for one minute and spent the days chatting, learning how to walk and eating…these girls just ate and ate and ate. That’s what you do when you are starved.

12web — *Bowie is the hen in the background.*

Bowie was named after 1970’s David Bowie because she was so thin and pale…and looked like an alien hen!

After about one month, these two girls were introduced to my special needs flock and slowly they fitted in.

Bowie has grown into a huge, vocal girl who is incredibly cheeky and is no longer afraid of us at all.

She wanders around in her own world. Her nickname is “Life On Mars” because she is so (charmingly) strange. We don’t know what goes on in her mind, but it is different to the rest of the chickens. She has her own world and she is happy in it. Apparently there is life on mars.

Please don’t use my images without permission. All images are Copyright Tamara Kenneally

Greedy

The first time I saw him, he was cuddled up with another lamb in the front seat of a car. He was just a few days old. He was tiny and had brown tipped ears. He travelled up to Lefty’s Place that night with his little lamb friend, myself and my friend. We were only supposed to look after them for the weekend to give their foster carer a bit of a rest. They arrived on Wednesday and were scheduled to go back on Saturday night, but as soon as J lifted Greedy out of the car, I could tell we would have problems. The constant “oh, aren’t they gorgeous” made me instantly think that we now had two more animal residents…..and I was correct.

So we had two little 3 day old lambs living in our back room who needed names. One grabbed his bottle with such passion that his name became “Greedy”. The other boy found every single way to get out of his pen, he pushed, he jumped, he wriggled and climbed his way out. He was trouble, so his name became “Trouble”.

These two little lambs were found one cold night in mid June, 2013. Two rescuers found them near death in an icy field in Victoria. They had been abandoned by their mothers because their mothers could not look after the twins and triplets they had just given birth to. Ewes find it difficult to feed more than one lamb, especially in the icy cold of a Victorian winter. Two little lambs between 0-1 day old lay in a paddock waiting for death until two rescuers picked them up and secured them a future in this world.

About two days after the boys arrived, Greedy stopped taking his bottle. We rushed him to the vet and he was found to have a severe infection due to not receiving colustrum from his mother. We thought he was going to die, but Greedy is a sheep who fights to live and he definitely did just that.

At 5 months old, Greedy and Trouble were living outside with the big boys and happily enjoying life. One Friday afternoon I got a frantic call from J saying that he arrived home and couldn’t find Greedy. There was no sign. I rushed up from work and searched all night and all the next day. We searched high and low. But there was no sign of him. He had just vanished. I left to go back to work on the Saturday night quite distressed, leaving a broken man behind who was still searching into the night. At 12am he rang me yelling “I got him. I got him” He had found Greedy stuck under a huge prickle bush. His back leg had been caught in the fork of a tree and he just hadn’t been able to shift it. J only found Greedy because he heard Greedy’s desperate cries. You see, Greedy had started calling out in distress because a fox had started eating his face. The fox ate off all of his lips and nose before J found him. With blood pouring from his face, Greedy was carried back to the house and nursed through the night until the vet arrived. Our vet patched him up and told us he would be ok as long as we nursed him through and prevented infection the best we could.

It was a long journey, but Greedy healed, both physically and emotionally. For quite some time there he was terrified and not his usual, sweet self.

Greedy has since lost his brown tipped ears, but still has a twinkle in his eyes. These days Greedy is a big, beautiful, friendly sheep who is like a dog. He follows you, comes when he is called and loves a pat…and he is still the greediest of them all!

Please don’t use my images without permission. All images are Copyright Tamara Kenneally

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Matilda

She was so very tiny. The smallest, skinniest and most featherless hen in that particular cage.

She was terrified when that cage door opened and two hands reached in and grabbed her, but she didn’t know how lucky she was.
16 months of living in that tiny wire cage with 5 other hens was now going to be a distant memory.

I took her home with three other bald hens that night. It was April and the nights had started to get cold.
These four little girls huddled together in their straw bed for their first night of freedom.
Matilda was terrified of us. She immediately became the lowest in the flock because of her size and submission.
She ran from us at every turn. She was just tiny. A waif of a hen with beautiful big eyes and a pretty defined face.

As time went on, Matilda grew in confidence and found out exactly who she was.
She learnt how much she loved straw. Straw is Matilda’s very favourite thing in the whole world.
A new hay bale sees her eyes light up and she spends the rest of the day fossicking around in the straw.

This is Matilda, 18 months after rescue.

Matilda died in June, 2017. I wrote the following about her when she died _

Matilda loved straw. We lifted her out of that battery cage in April, 2013 and that night i put her in a bed full of straw and from that moment, she realised what she had been put on this earth for – she had been put on the earth to be with straw. Her days were filled with eye bulging excitement when new straw arrived and she would make her strange sound like a camel to alert everyone that her day was definitely an A+ day because straw was here.

Our strange, somewhat alien little lady, who arrived completely bald, left the world today with her head in my hand and in peace. She didn’t want to leave this earth, she loved her life and her freedom, but her body gave up and I had to make the decision to let her go on to her next life, wherever that may be. I hope it’s somewhere that straw is plentiful.

I drove home with her little body in my car wondering why on earth I do this to myself. Rescuing these hens, knowing these hens and loving these hens only to say goodbye to them only a few years later. Why do I torture myself so? Then I looked over to my passenger seat where I had Neptune in a carry cage and I saw her little face peering up out of the sheet covering her cage. There she was, just peering up at me, looking me right in the eyes…..ah, ok, I thought….there’s my reason. There’s my reason.

Goodbye you funny, odd old girl full of passion. It was an honour to know you.

Please don’t use my images without permission. All images are Copyright Tamara Kenneally