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"Minny's Dream by Clare Druce"
Minny’s Dream

Review by Karen Davis, PhD, President of United Poultry Concerns

“Please, never, ever, call me a battery hen. . . . I am in a battery cage, and I do live on a battery farm. But I am not, repeat not a battery hen. . . . I, Minny, am a proud descendant of the Red Jungle Fowl.”

Imagine moving from the city to the country cottage of your dreams only to discover a battery hen business nearby. This is what happens to Paula and her parents in this riveting tale for young people. It tells what happens when the adventurous Paula Brown takes a walk one day from Orchard Cottage to Folly Farm to buy eggs. Approaching the... More > farm, she wonders why there are no animals about the place – no chickens, cows, or pigs – just a huge Alsatian dog “crouching beside a gloomy kennel.”

What Paula finds instead are ten “bleak rows of sheds” emanating “a musty, sickly sort of smell, unlike anything she knew.” Instead of a “jolly farmer,” out comes snarling Mr. Dredge, who tells her, “you’re not wanted here.” But he soon boasts he has a quarter of a million hens inside the ten sheds, “twenty-five thousand per shed.”

Paula talks Mr. Dredge into letting her accompany him into Shed Ten.

“Paula knew she would never forget the moment when she first saw the rows of cages, stacked from floor to ceiling, five tiers high. And she knew she’d never forget the first time she heard the sound of twenty-five thousand hens, all together in one building. It took a few seconds for her eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom, and to realize that the ghostly impression was due to the myriads of cobwebs that hung from the roof girders, and festooned various iron struts and items of machinery. Dusty light bulbs glowed dully the length of the aisle down which Mr. Dredge was leading the way.”

Suddenly she hears a voice from the top cages, imploring: “return, and I’ll fill you in on every single miserable, rotten, cruel aspect of this dismal place!”

“Paula: ‘Who are you?’
Voice: ‘I’m Minny, and I’ve been standing or crouching down on this wire floor for the best part of a year. Yes, I’m Minny, a proud descendant of the Red Jungle Fowl. Say you’ll come back. You see, you’re our only hope.’”

From this point, Paula lives a secret life. She visits Minny and learns about Minny’s life in the battery cage, her “ancestral memories,” and how those memories form Minny’s dream of the future she longs for – “Busy, yet contented.” But, Minny tells Paula wistfully, “The terrible thing about dreaming beautiful dreams is that you have to wake up, and face another day.”

Meanwhile, time flies. The Shed Ten hens are about to be sent to slaughter, for, Mr. Dredge tells Paula: “Them hens” are “rubbish.” Paula faces a decision: she “had never gone against her parents’ wishes in anything really important. . . . But here she was, planning to steal three hens! No, not steal, she reminded herself. . . . Perhaps she would be put away, to wherever they put children instead of prison. Perhaps. . . .“


“’Minny, I’ll have to go,’ Paula hisses when she hears Mr. Dredge coming! ‘But I promise I’ll be back.’”

What happens next? Buy this wonderful book, with its modern moral dilemmas, and find out! Highly Recommended reading for young people.




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