Thank you to everyone who answered me , I am truly grateful.
I do find loosing any animal really hard , I'm sure you all do,you seem never to really find out why which is where the blame and guilt starts nagging at you, it's something I will never get use to and little Nol was my first chicken to go.You want so much to give them everything but I couldn't give her more time here.
I never considered having chickens before and then I saw a programme on tv about lives of battery hens . I thought it so terribly sad , these places seem helpless but I never forgot , then one day I I picked up a book in the library and it had a short story that went:
A man was walking down the beach that was covered in thousands and thousands of starfish that had been washed up and were dying. In the distance he could see a man picking them up one by one and throwing them back into the sea.When he reached the man he said, ' Why are you throwing them into the sea?', the man replied , 'I want to save them by giving them back their life.'But you can't possibly save all of them , there are so many, you can't make that much of a difference.'The man them bent down and picked up a starfish and threw it as far out to sea as he possibly could , then he turned to the man and said, 'That's true but it made a big difference to that one.
That was it within no time I got my 6 girls and haven't regretted a thing .I never got them for eggs ,oddly I'm allergic,but my neighbour loves them!
It doesn't matter why we have them , ex -batts or not as long as they are happy and loved, even we don't always get that!