The Things That Should Have Gone Extinct 🫶🐓🦖

But as we pulled to the side of the winding road, hazard lights flashing against the bend, the truth became clear. These were not hens at all. They were two young, skeletal and grimy Rhode Island Red roosters.

And therein lay their crime.

At barely three months old, their feathers were dulled beneath layers of dried mud. Whilst hens of their breed are prized for the eggs they will lay, roosters are too often treated as an inconvenient byproduct. They were discarded not for anything they had done, but simply because of who they were.

The sight of them drinking desperately from a muddy puddle stung with a quiet cruelty all of its own, but with passing traffic bringing fresh urgency, there was no time to pause. And so with a scattering of seed, a careful approach, a deft movement of the wrist—and just like that, they were safe.

We named them Dino and T-Rex.

Their names seem so fitting, for every chicken carries within them the remarkable legacy of the dinosaurs. They are a living reminder that life has a way of enduring against extraordinary odds. 

Today, the boys are proving themselves to be everything their former circumstances suggested they were not. They are gentle, friendly, charmingly curious and rarely stray from each other’s side.

And as we have just found, they have a fondness for watermelon!

Yet as we watch them settle into sanctuary life, we cannot help but think there is something else that should have gone the way of the dinosaur long ago: the outdated notion that an animal’s worth is determined solely by their usefulness to us.

For every hen who lays an egg, there is a brother whose fate is rarely seen, little less spoken of. Dino and T-Rex are among the lucky few whose stories will be told. And perhaps that is where real evolution begins, not in changing animals, but in changing ourselves.