Fifteen hundred chickens finally caught a break Thursday.

The best thing that ever happened to them in their young lives happened to them in Vacaville, when they moved into their new home at an animal sanctuary and saw the sun, earth, sky and a rooster for the very first time.

“Welcome home, darlings,” said Jan Galeazzi, the manager of Animal Place, as she opened cage after cage and the chickens scrambled out. “We’re glad you’re here. We love you. Everything is going to be all right now.”

Everything had definitely not been all right for them. The chickens, egg layers between ages 1 and 2 whose best egg-laying days were behind them, were former residents of a Kern County indoor chicken ranch where they had been scheduled for euthanasia.

Instead, a dozen volunteers in five trucks arranged to drive from Vacaville under cover of darkness, pick up the chickens and bring them north. The dead-of-night timing was to prevent the chickens from becoming overheated on a daytime journey. Their rescue was the biggest thing to hit Vacaville since Roscoe the police dog won the Western states police dog championships two months ago.

Animal Place, located down a dirt road on the western edge of town, is a sanctuary for animals that usually don’t get any. There are sanctuaries for zoo and circus elephants and there are sanctuaries for old horses. But there are few sanctuaries for chickens which, said sanctuary founder Kim Sturla, is a shame.

“All life is precious,” she said. “The more sexy animals have their sanctuaries. But we don’t differentiate between dogs, cats, horses and chickens. If we can save 1,500 lives, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

A chicken is no different from the person who rescues the chicken, when you think about it, said Sturla.

“Chickens feel stress and pain, just like us,” she said. “They develop relationships and have bonds. If you could see the kind of place they came from, you would never eat another omelet in your life.”

The place they came from was top secret, Sturla said. She wants to rescue more chickens, so developing relationships and having bonds with egg ranchers is vital.

The 1,500 chickens arrived in mid-morning and were carried in their crates by their do-gooder friends into three spacious barns decked out with comfy bales of hay, softly whirring electric fans, lots of feeders and no cages. Then the volunteers opened the crates and the birds flapped out for their first taste of the good life.

Most of them seemed to have no idea what to do or how to be a real chicken instead of a cooped-up egg-laying machine. They emerged from their crates into the bright light of a new day like a moviegoer stepping into the sunshine after a double feature.

“Cluck,” said a chicken.

After a few weeks of chicken rehab (“they like to sunbathe,” said Galeazzi), the birds will be ready for adoption. Would-be chicken owners must pass rigorous vetting, be of good character, possess a backyard chicken coop and sign a formal contract promising not to eat the chicken.

Since no good deed goes unpunished, the mass chicken rescue did not go off without a glitch. One of the rented rescue vans, full of 200 chickens, got a flat tire near Santa Nella in Merced County. The spare tire, it turned out, was trapped underneath the crates of chickens, so Animal Place had the van towed to a service station for a new tire.

“We have to pay for the tire ourselves,” said one volunteer. “That’s how it goes when you try to do the right thing.”

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com