(Beth Clifton collage)
Rare good news on a grim anniversary
NEW YORK, N.Y.––Twenty years after al Qaida terrorists on September 11, 2001 hijacked four airliners and crashed two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, killing 2,763 people, tens of thousands of New Yorkers awakened to a good news story.
About chickens.
Chickens, slaughtered in the U.S. at the rate of about 1.1 billion per year, seldom make headlines. Chicken rescue wins attention even more seldom.
(Donny Moss photo)
300 hens dumped accidentally
But on the morning of September 11, 2021, less than two weeks after the U.S. retreat from Afghanistan ended 20 years of warfare that began with the attempt to capture al Qaida terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, a chicken rescue gave New Yorkers something to smile about––at least until many of them tucked into breakfasts of eggs and bacon.
At about 11:15 a.m. the day before, summarized New York Daily News reporter Elizabeth Keogh of an Animal Care Centers of New York media release, “Animal rights activists raced to a busy Brooklyn intersection where hundreds of chickens were abandoned after they fell from a delivery truck.
“About 300 crated Cornish Cross chickens were discovered on Flushing Avenue and Williamsburg Street,” Keogh continued.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Kaporos
The chickens, Animal Care Centers of New York believed, “were intended for use in the Orthodox Jewish ritual known as Kaporos.
“Kaporos,” Keogh explained, “is performed by swinging a chicken around one’s head three times while reciting a prayer for forgiveness before slitting the chicken’s throat. The practice is done on the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.”
Originating in eastern Europe, Kaporos is practiced only by a small minority of the ultra-conservative Hassidic branch of Judaism. At that, Kaporos is practiced in public chiefly in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and some cities in Israel, with small and mostly private observances among Hassidic communities elsewhere.
(See Kaporos: chicken soup for the soulless?)
“It is estimated between 50,000 and 100,000 chickens are sacrificed each year during Kaporos.” Keogh wrote.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Many chickens die waiting”
“Many chickens die from exposure, dehydration, and malnutrition while sitting outside without access to food or water, waiting, before anyone even uses them for the Kaporos ritual,” Animal Care Centers spokesperson Katy Hansen told Keogh.
Added Keogh, “The owner of the slaughterhouse responsible for transporting the chickens declined to rescue them, said Hansen.”
Altogether, Hansen said, the rescuers recovered 253 live chickens, 14 of them injured, and 30 dead chickens, several of whom appear to have been dead even before the accident.
Elaborated Jill Carnegie of the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos, “The Official NYC Kaporos Team were the first responders. Multiple crates of baby chickens had fallen off a transport truck making a sharp turn,” apparently hitting the curb. Nearly 250 birds were running loose in the streets [or were] trapped in direct hot sun,” still in plastic crates.
(Mikey Dee photo)
50 loose chickens to the car
“Our team assessed and triaged every bird, and dove under trucks in the busy road to make sure every single chicken was safe,” Carnagie said.
“Thank you to Allie Feldman Taylor of Voters For Animal Rights,” Carnegie specified, “for alerting us and acting quickly at the scene, in addition to our other skillful volunteers. We are now partnering with Animal Care Centers of NYC to place the birds in good homes and get them the care they need.”
Emailed Taylor herself, “Two Voters For Animal Rights board members,” believed to be Michelle Aptman and Mikey Dee, “loaded their car with approximately 50 chickens each, while Animal Care Centers was able to transport hundreds after the incredibly quick and efficient injury checks by the Kind Kaporos team.
Left: believed to be Michelle Aptman; beside her, believed to be Mikey Dee.
(Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos photo)
“Grateful to quick-thinking bystander”
“We’re grateful to the quick-thinking bystander,” Taylor said, “who contacted Voters For Animal Rights for assistance, and the teams from NYCACC and Kind Kaporos, for making sure that these chickens received prompt assistance. But situations like these happen all too frequently,” Taylor noted, “and the chickens who remained on the truck will suffer a terrible fate.”
Carnagie posted to Facebook that the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos had raised $10,000 to help fund the chicken rescue, care, and rehoming.
“Some of the Kaporos survivors from NYC are already making it to their forever homes,” Carnagie said.
Animal Nation, of Rye, New York, took in 120 of the chickens, posting that, “Permanent placement has been secured for them all at various sanctuaries along the East Coast. Thank you Happy Heart-Happy Home Farm and Rescue, Twist of Fate Farm and Sanctuary and Rancho Relaxo.”
Karen Davis & friends.
(United Poultry Concerns photo)
Kaporos in 2001
Animal advocacy protests against Kaporos had already been staged in New York City for at least a decade before September 2001. Kaporos began in New York City that year on September 21.
Wrote United Poultry Concerns founder Karen Davis then, “While ‘chicken swinging’ may be a protected religious practice in the United States at present, depriving the birds of food and water and forcing them to sit in crates in the streets for days, up to an entire week, is not.
“Notwithstanding, thousands of chickens sat miserably in crates from September 21-September 27 [2001] in New York City without proper food, water, or shelter, even though the State of New York charges ‘peace officers’ with enforcing its anti-cruelty laws. In cases of animal cruelty and neglect, the primary peace officer agency handling this duty is the American SPCA,” a role it had from 1866 until 2013.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“ASPCA did not enforce the law”
“However, this year as in years past,” Davis continued, “the ASPCA did not enforce the law when called upon to do so by distressed residents. A humane officer merely paid a token visit that ‘didn’t substantiate anything that was a matter of cruelty.’
“An ASPCA officer told United Poultry Concerns that he saw ‘hoses’ but no water containers in the crates in which the chickens sat in the streets, and that he didn’t know how, or whether, the birds were being fed; he merely saw some feed bags someplace.
“On being pressed for details, the officer told UPC that he had been sent to investigate a type of animal he knew little or nothing about and that the ASPCA could do nothing about water deprivation anyway unless it led to an ‘injury,’ which he defined as ‘the death of the animal.’ This ‘humane’ officer told United Poultry Concerns: ‘Nobody is going to get seriously worked up over an animal that tomorrow is going to be somebody’s dinner.’”
New York City live market.
(Sara Rahbar photo)
Nothing much changed
Nothing much has changed for Kaporos chickens since then, nor for chickens in the many New York City live poultry markets on every day of the year.
(See Live animal markets in New York City: a cut-throat business at best.)
The New York City Police Department, handed the responsibility for cruelty law enforcement after the ASPCA quit doing it, not only does not cite Kaporos chicken sellers for multiple violations of both applicable anti-cruelty laws and city health code, but also provides traffic barriers to the vendors who block busy streets.
But both the annual protests and the annual public practice of Kaporos appear to have escalated in scale, and at least sometimes in intensity.
Who was that masked man? Two views of Donny Moss at Gotham protest against Kaporos. (Beth Clifton collage)
Watermelon slices & talking points
Some anti-Kaporos protesters each year, including Their Turn blogger Donny Moss this year, arrive at curbside chicken sales sites armed with water and watermelon slices for thirsty chickens, and talking points, hoping to engage the sellers and observers in debate.
This works about as well as trying to debate anyone else at a supermarket meat counter.
This year one vendor repeatedly accused Moss and others of poisoning his chickens. Children helping to sell the chickens amplified the allegation.
Other protesters arrive with bullhorns and just scream. Kaporos practitioners scream back, sometimes hurling dead chickens at activists.
Thirty years of video documentation of New York City protests against Kaporos demonstrate little change in either tactics or accomplishment toward ending it.
Paul Steller.
The Bearded Vegans
Observers Andy Tabar, owner of the Compassion Co. organic clothing maker, and Paul Steller, a math teacher, have supported anti-Kaporos protest almost from the debut of their Bearded Vegans podcast series.
Episode 32, for instance, aired first on August 31, 2013, centered on an interview with Rina Deych of the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos.
But Tabar and Steller “started The Bearded Vegans podcast with a desire to move beyond the basic Vegan 101 and create more nuanced discussions for the seasoned vegan,” their web site explains, including “in depth, honest, unapologetic and often uncomfortable discussions about the ethical grey areas of veganism. Through these conversations,” Tabar and Steller explain, “we aim to figure out how to create a stronger, more effective, and inclusive animal rights movement.”
Andy Tabar.
Tabar on anti-Kaporos protests
Said Tabar on the September 1, 2021 Bearded Vegans podcast, “I’m thinking about the Kaporos protests that happen in New York City [when] the Orthodox Jewish community kills chickens. Every year out in the street there’s a bunch of activists yelling at them. And I have talked to people [who] have been there. And the takeaway that I’ve heard from several people is that they just don’t feel like what is happening is really productive.
“The takeaway,” Tabar continued, “is if you have someone who believes so strongly that this animal exploitation is a part of their religion, their ability to expel their sins, you are not going to get through to that person if you are not a part of that community. There are people in that community who are doing that work. I feel like our position should be to support them and let them do their thing. There are so many other things that we can focus on. I feel like it’s just not a good look if people are going in yelling at people doing this ceremony.”
Pattrice Jones & friends.
Pattrice Jones responds
That detonated Pattrice Jones, who introduces herself as an “ecofeminist writer, scholar, and activist who, along with Miriam Jones, cofounded VINE Sanctuary, an LGBTQ-run farmed animal sanctuary” in Springfield, Vermont.
Defending the annual New York City protests, Jones in an “Open letter to The Bearded Vegans” wrote that “In addition to standing up against cruelty and literally saving lives, these activists show the many children in attendance that another way of being in relationship to animals is possible.”
What the decades of videos mostly show, though, are Hassidic children either cowering away from screaming activists, or giving reasonable activists like Donny Moss the finger.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Misrepresentation
Continued Jones, evidently not checking her allegations against The Bearded Vegans transcript, “This year, just as these steadfast activist are revving up for another round, you took it upon yourselves to publicly opine that their efforts are worthless. So, now, while in the midst of making preparations and bracing themselves for the enormously difficult week to come, these activists have to cope with the emotional impact of having their efforts denigrated by a popular podcast.
“Can you imagine? You can’t. You’re two guys — yes, we get it, beards = MEN — who feel yourself entitled to issue pronouncements on the worth of the work of women. Yes, women.
“How dare you say that our work means nothing? How dare you call yourself vegan while saying that the lives of those chickens mean nothing?”
Reality is that neither Tabar nor Steller said any such thing.
KKK members leafleting at the 1992 Hegins pigeon shoot. (Merritt Clifton photo)
Reinforcing resistance
What The Bearded Vegans did point out is that if the goal of anti-Kaporos street protests is to stop Kaporos, those protests are clearly not succeeding, and have if anything reinforced the resistance of the Hassidic community to change.
Comparably, years of mass protests have failed to stop the Omak Suicide Race in Omak, Washington, and failed to stop the Labor Day pigeon shoot held from 1935 until 1999 in Hegins, Pennsylvania.
(See Did the Omak Suicide Race start with a horse massacre & the KKK?)
The Hegins shoot, the last public pigeon shoot held in the U.S., ended after 63 years in 1998, after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in July 1999 that pigeon shoot promoters and participants could be charged with cruelty.
The Hegins organizers did not attempt to challenge the law, though pigeon shoots continue elsewhere in Pennsylvania at venues not open to the public.
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Christians kill more animals than satanists. In this day and age, we should condemn a religion which still permits the killing of animals, just as we would condemn a religion which still practices human sacrifice. In 2000, after the “Y2K” scare, animal activists were already relegating meat-eating to the days of the caveman, with t-shirts and bumper stickers reading: “It’s the 21st century, and you’re *still* eating animals?!”
Editor’s note: Karen Davis’ response to “Bearded Vegan” Andy Tabor below, like the previous “Open Letter to the Bearded Vegans” by Pattrice Jones, opens by alleging that Tabar said something he simply never did, and goes off factually half-cocked from there.
Both Davis and Jones are entitled to their strategic opinions, but it would be grossly unfair to Tabar, fringing on libelous, not to set the record straight right from the start about what exactly he did say, the substance of which appears above under the subhead “Tabar on anti-Kaporos protests.” Also worth mentioning is that Tabar on The Bearded Vegans podcast of September 8, 2021, a week after making his initial comments, offered an extensive summary of the current Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos activities, which he is wrongly accused of having ignored.
Karen Davis:
Andy Tabor and those animal “advocates” who share his opinion. that animal activists should not focus our activism on chicken Kaporos, would do well to educate themselves about what United Poultry Concerns’ Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos, which we founded in 2010, does and has been doing since then, earlier, and since. Andy’s opinion reminds me of NYT columnist Marc Bittman’s writing a few years ago that activists’ focus on exposing and eliminating the source of foie gras was misplaced, since only “a few” ducks and geese are abused for foie gras compared with billions of chickens – as if we were not focusing on all animals suffering for “food.”
I am grateful to Pattrice Jones for challenging Andy’s comment. People, whether in our movement or outside of it, who contend that vegan campaigns “aren’t working” and other negative contentions, are poorly informed.
For the record, the Alliance and our allies do not engage in “shouting matches” with Kaporos practitioners in Brooklyn any more. We are expressing, through our compassionate care for the chickens onsite, a different way of viewing and treating chickens than hurting and killing them for an “atonement” that can be enacted in peaceful, charitable ways, like symbolically “swinging” a packet of coins, reciting the chant, and then giving money directly to their favorite charities.
Since 2010, the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos has done a myriad of things to bring attention to this ritual and the misery of the chickens, and we will continue to do so among the many other things we do to try to get people to understand and care about chickens and all animals. I don’t know whether Andy Tabar has ever attended an actual Kaporos ritual performance, but if not, he should. Naysayers and armchair critics are not wanted or needed, thank you. Once again, thank you, Pattrice Jones, for speaking out on behalf of the birds and the effort to rescue them, literally and perceptually, from the hell they are in. VINE animal sanctuary, of which Pattrice is a cofounder with Miriam Jones, has been an invaluable comrade organization intellectually, morally, and with boots on the ground activism.
For the record, waiting for “insiders” to change their cruel attitudes and habits, without the intervention of “outsiders”: this approach didn’t help the African American victims of Jim Crow laws, to cite one of many examples of the role of the Outsider in helping to promote change from within a society fixated reflexively on maintaining the brutal status quo.
What Andy Tabar said, again, was this, beginning with an observation about human nature in the specific context of defensive responses to perceived attacks on articles of religious faith: “If you have someone who believes so strongly that this animal exploitation is a part of their religion, their ability to expel their sins, you are not going to get through to that person if you are not a part of that community. There are people in that community who are doing that work. I feel like our position should be to support them and let them do their thing. There are so many other things that we can focus on.”
Time and again, perhaps beginning with infamous “Bunny Bop” held annually in Harmony, North Carolina, from 1946 to 1967, which was ended in part by the vocal opposition of advice columnist Ann Landers and Fund for Animals founder Cleveland Amory, animal advocates have had the opportunity to learn that often no amount of outside disapproval and public pressure is sufficient to end an abusive practice which has became intertwined with an small, isolated community’s sense of self-identity; but such practices, and support for them, often disintegrate from within once the external pressure is relaxed, allowing cracks to develop in what had appeared to be a solid wall defending the indefensible.
“Often,” of course, is not “always.” But what works as a tactical approach inevitably depends on the context of time, place, and issue. To extrapolate from Tabar’s comment about a specific response to a ritual practiced by an insular local religious community that he was rejecting the whole idea of campaigning from outside on broad-front social issues is both unfair and inaccurate. The very name of his and Paul Steller’s podcast, The Bearded Vegans, demonstrates their commitment to changing eating habits which result in suffering comparable to that of chickens killed for Kaporos by 1.2 million chickens killed for meat each and every year. Tabar (and Steller) simply appear to believe that a more appropriate place and time for non-Hassidic Jews to protest on behalf of chickens would be a place and time involving the broader chicken-eating community, especially since the average Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise is responsible for far more chicken deaths per year than the entire Kaporos ritual in New York City.
To add to my previous comment: In relation to mainstream, conventional society, animal rights vegan advocates are the Outsiders wedging our way into conventional society’s entrenched attitudes and behaviors toward animals, particularly toward farmed animals. The defense of consuming animals amounts to a type of orthodox “religious” support for, and defense of, an animal-abusing diet. Virtually every effort to reach American society on behalf of farmed animals and choosing animal-free food could be said to be “unproductive.”
I must say, too, in rereading Pattrice Jones’s rejection of the Bearded Vegans’ claim that we should simply let Hasidic insiders deal with the chicken Kaporos ritual themselves: Our intervention has helped inspire more and more rabbis to publicize their opposition to swinging and slaughtering chickens as an “atonement.” Indeed, “religion” and “atonement” are a cover for a huge money-making scam perpetrated by self-interested Hasidic rabbis to get ordinary Hasidic people to fork over $20 or more dollars for each chicken per person, including for each child, in the pathetic belief that this chicken-punishing behavior will cleanse them of their sins.
Our intervention into the Kaporos ritual is part of our overall effort to get people to SEE chickens as individuals with feelings and fears the same as their “pets.” The Alliance has discussed and incorporated, or discontinued, MANY STRATEGIES over the years to help free the chickens from Kaporos. Our campaign, which includes a lawsuit that reached the NY Court of Appeals in 2018 (the highest Court in New York State) is multifaceted.
Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns and the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos. http://www.upc-online.org
Karen Davis’ claim that “Virtually every effort to reach American society on behalf of farmed animals and choosing animal-free food could be said to be ‘unproductive'” overlooks that vegan food products are now prominently sold in every supermarket and consumed routinely by millions more Americans than ever in any way participated in animal rights or vegan activism, or for that matter paid any attention to it. That “The way to a man’s heart is through is stomach” is affirmed by every sale of a plant-based alternative to an animal product. The $7 billion in sales generated in 2020 by Plants-Based Food Association member companies amounts to several hundred times more economic clout than all the funds raised by animal advocacy groups over the past 30 years.
It’s my feeling and belief that all religious ideologies, encouraging compassion (for our fellow humans, or at very least, our co-religionists) needs to evolve to include compassion for our fellow living beings. Religion, like culture, is, again IMHO, meant to evolve. What was a life lesson thousands of years ago may have been needed then. We are not living in those times now. An entirely innocent surrogate cannot “atone” for the sins of a human being and that human being should never be pardoned after such an action, which is, if anything, a greater sin against an innocent living being who, having been created by the same One Who created us, is presumably also cared for and entitled to life. Again, just my feeling and belief, unpopular as it may be.
Sharing to socials with gratitude.
Still, even if we attempt to be tolerant of other beliefs and practices, one has to wonder about those that impose such horrific suffering upon other beings in the name of religion. Not very compassionate, not very humane, and an anathema to what most denominations encourage among their faithful. Kaporos, like Santeria, has no place among civilized society.
The problem specific to both Kaporos and Santeria is that almost exactly the same animal handling practices and slaughter methods can be observed at the many live markets in New York City, and many other major U.S. cities, every working day. Change that reality, whether by education, demonstrations, or effective enforcement of laws already on the books, and activists will be in a much stronger position to target minority religious practices.