The imposing car is parked in front of the rectangular building, a trailer attached to the back, at the end of a path in Guémené-Penfao (Loire-Atlantique). At the entrance to the chicken coop, Manon Dugas, 29, a hose in her hands, and Brice Lahy, 36, spray water transport cages before a new trip. “We are leaving tomorrow for Mayenne to adopt two hundred henss, describes Manon Dugas. Next week, we will go to Sarthe to bring back three hundred more. »
Animal lovers and vegetarians, they discovered that at the age of 18 months the hens were doomed to the slaughterhouse, because they no longer lay enough to be profitable. With their association Les Caquetteuses, founded in December 2020, they want to offer them a better future with private individuals. “Our goal is for them to have a good life,” explains Brice Lahy, looking lighthearted.
Since November 2021, this couple based in Sérent (Morbihan) has not stopped. Today he has a challenge: getting the 25,000 or so cocottes of the Poulehouse company adopted. Placed in compulsory liquidation on 1er February, the company promised, from its inception in 2017, “an egg that does not kill the hen” by offering a happy ending to reformed gallinaceans (deemed unfit to produce). But the company only had time to create one retirement home, in Haute-Vienne. After the end of a partnership with the Cocorette brand, its activity and that of its breeders stopped dead. “Today, we have between 11,000 and 12,000 hens left to adopt. Honestly, we didn’t think we’d be able to save so many,” rejoices Brice Lahy, an unemployed ex-computer scientist.
41,000 adoptive families
In recent years, associations seeking to save hens have multiplied: Les Ch’tites cocottes, in the North; Champ libre aux poules, in the Gers… Thanks to a network of volunteers, Les Caquetteuses works with farms all over France, except those in battery or above ground so as not to support this type of farm whose eggs can no longer be sold in boxes since this year. In 2021, 41,000 families adopted chickens through it.
“After so many years of career, we didn’t even think anymore, they laid eggs, they died. Slaughterhouses make money off our backs by selling them when they buy them back from us at a pittance. » Elisabeth and Pierrick Duval, breeders
“People often don’t know that hens end up in the slaughterhouse so young, when they can live for at least five years and still lay,” explains Manon Dugas, soon to be an employee of the association. “The population is very poorly informed about agri-food and farming conditions, observes Romain Espinosa, economist, animal condition specialist at Cired (CNRS). Especially since empathy decreases with genetic distance, hens come at the end of the ranking, according to several studies. »
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