Where do our Rooster Residents Come From?
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM Rooster Redemption
September 2019

Roosters are rescued after having been brutalized for cockfighting, kaporos rituals, being useless for egg production...

Ex-cockfighters:

Cockfighting is illegal in the U.S. and unfortunately it continues all over the country. When authorities bust cockfighting rings, thousands of birds are typically euthanized due to "the inability to be rehabilitated due to aggression." This could not be further from the truth. Our ex-fighters are the sweetest birds and all they want is love and respect.

Religious Rituals/Kaporos:

Every year in Brooklyn, NY (and other cities around the country) some members of the Ultra Orthodox Jewish community hold Kaporos at the end of September. This ritual involves shipping in 60,000 baby chickens, just a few weeks old, in crates to sit on the streets for up to a week with no food or water or protection from the elements. For the duration of the ritual which lasts a few days, paying customers have a bird swung around their head with their wings painfully held behind their backs while a prayer is said, then the bird's throat is slit. The purpose of this practice is for the human's sins to go into the bird's sins. This practice was banned in Israel and rabbis all over the world are opposed to this. It violates seven laws involving public safety but the authorities do not enforce these, instead they protect the event and typically arrest activists.

Abandoned/Dumped:

Common practice for backyard chicken farmers is to purchase chicks either by mail or at stores with intentions to raise them for eggs. This results in many chicks being "sexed" as females and the "batch" typically has one or more males. Once the unsuspecting buyers find out they are males when they start crowing 6 months later, they are immediately unwanted or prohibited where they live. They are often found on city streets or in suburbs. A quote I will never forget from one of these people was "our last batch of roosters were so nasty we dumped them in the woods" with a grin on their face.

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