Farm Rescue

July 1, 2010

I've just released the beta version of a Facebook game called Farm Rescue. It's somewhat of a parody of the popular farming games on Facebook that exposes some of the tragedies of real factory farming. The purpose of the project is to educate the public about intensive confinement of egg-laying hens in battery cages, and how this confinement deprives hens of all of their most important natural behaviors, causing them intense frustration and pain.

In the game, you can adopt chickens who were rescued from battery cages and bring them back to health by helping them practice their natural behaviors, like perching, nesting, dustbathing, exercising, and exploring. The more you help your chickens practice their natural behaviors, the faster they will recover and grow their feathers back. When they're at full health, you can adopt them out to good homes. For more information, check out the Farm Rescue website, or play the game now on Facebook!

You can use this game to share information and help spread the word about battery cages with your friends and family on Facebook. Here are a couple of ways you can do this:

1. Invite your friends to play the game.
2. Send gifts to your friends.
3. Within the game, you can click on the 'Take Action' button in the upper right to find things you can do to help real chickens. Just click on the 'Share' button to post these actions to your wall. Check out the actions!
4. Every time you play the game, the first time one of your hens completes a behavior, you'll get a chance to post this to your Facebook wall, with a sentence of information about why that behavior is important to chickens. Try it.

The game is still in beta, so if you run into any errors, please let me know. Happy chicken rescuing!