Chicken Blood Is Everywhere!
For the past 26 years, Rina Deych has protested the ritual slaughter of chickens.
Each year, in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, over 50,000 chickens are killed in pop-up slaughterhouses on the streets of Brooklyn (as they are elsewhere around the world) during a ritual called kapparot, in which some Hasidic Jews wave chickens over their heads exactly three times and then slaughter the chickens. The practice has often been explained as a symbolic transfer of human sins onto the birds, but some rabbinic authorities say that the ritual doesn’t absolve participants, it only inspires them to repentance. In either case, the chickens are kept in crowded crates and often unfed in the days leading up to the ritual; some die before kapparot even takes place.