Animal rights activists told Gothamist they rescued 83 chickens from an abandoned U-Haul truck in Flatbush, Brooklyn, on Friday night.
The NYPD confirmed the incident, which it said happened around 8:30 p.m. “The chickens were removed to an undisclosed sanctuary,” a police spokesperson said in a statement.
John Di Leonardo, executive director of Humane Long Island, said he received a call from a NYPD officer around 6 p.m. on Friday informing him about the chickens and the truck.
Di Leonardo, who said he works frequently with the NYPD to rescue animals in “ all sorts of cases from cockfighting to exotic animal crimes to things like this,” told Gothamist a group of about 15 activists from the Kaparos Compassion Project immediately set out from Long Island and New Jersey and arrived at the scene about two hours later.
“When we arrived on scene, birds were in horrible conditions,” he told Gothamist. “Flies all around them. They were all dehydrated, very, very weak. Many of them were dead.”
Di Leonardo said that dozens of dead chickens were found inside crates in the truck bed.
He said the NYPD told him it is looking for the person who abandoned the truck. Gothamist asked the NYPD to confirm it is conducting an investigation.
Photos from the scene shared with Gothamist show a sign affixed to the truck that reads “Kaparos To Go.” Rina Deych, a Jewish animal rights activist from Borough Park, told Gothamist that Kaparos is an ancient Jewish custom in which a live chicken is circled overhead during prayer and then slaughtered. Kaparos, which is only practiced by some ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects, typically takes place on the eve of Yom Kippur, which begins at sundown on Sunday, Sept. 20.
“It’s a very small percentage of Jews,” she said.
She added that there is an alternative way to practice the ritual where a bag is filled with money and raised over the head during prayer. Deych said the money is then donated to charity.
Deych said she has been working in various Brooklyn communities for 30 years to raise awareness about Kaparos, which she views as a cruel practice.
An animal rights group’s effort to stop the custom was defeated in New York court in 2018.
Di Leonardo confirmed that the chickens rescued Friday night were being brought to a New York City sanctuary. He declined to provide its specific location for safety reasons. When he spoke to Gothamist on Saturday afternoon, Di Leonardo said he was en route to another location in Brooklyn where a truck containing abandoned chickens had been found.
“ I’m calling the neighbors. We’re going on the way right there right now. There’s dead and dying chickens in a second ‘Kaparos to Go’ truck nearby,” he said.
Deych said she and others from the Kaparos Compassion Project would be visiting a Kaparos ritual planned in Crown Heights on Saturday night. But rather than stopping the practitioners, she said, her group will be feeding the chickens before they’re sacrificed.
“ We cut up strips of watermelon, and we stick them through the crates, and we try to feed as many chickens as we can to give them a little relief before they go through this horrific ritual,” she said.
In 2005, over 300 chickens intended for Kaparos were found crammed into wooden crates inside a vacant lot on Coney Island Avenue, the New York Post reported at the time. About 35 had drowned, and an Orthodox Jewish man was charged with animal cruelty in connection with their deaths. The remaining chickens were taken to an animal sanctuary in Upstate New York.
