Animal rights activists and police discovered hundreds of chickens, most already dead, crammed inside two abandoned U-Haul trucks in Brooklyn on Friday.
The first truck, found around 5 p.m. On Winthrop Avenue between East 45th Street and Troy Avenue, held 200 birds in crates with only 80 still alive. A second unattended truck was located about a mile and a half away at 910 St. Johns Place, authorities and advocates said. Police confirmed they are actively investigating the gruesome findings.
Rina Deych, founder of the Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos, has spent years fighting the ritual she believes the birds were destined for. “This bothers me because it’s so excruciatingly cruel and I cannot believe it’s still being done in this day and age,” she said.
Deych, who is Jewish, described how the animals are typically stored before the ceremony. “These chickens are squashed into crates, 10 to 18 in a crate and stacked 10 to 12 crates high. They’re left there for days and many of them die.”
The practice of Kaporos, performed by a small number of Orthodox Jews before Yom Kippur, involves a person waving a chicken above their head by the wings to symbolically transfer their sins to the animal. Deych explained what follows: “The slaughterer then turns the chicken upside down and slices its throat. These are baby chickens.”
John Di Leonardo, president of the Humane Long Island Anthrozoologist & Wildlife Rehabilitator, challenged the religious framing entirely. “People know about Santeria, they know about Voodoo, but they don’t know about this much larger sacrifice happening in their backyard,” he said. He claimed the ritual wasn’t even religious in nature.
Residents near the St. Johns Place location were confronted with the grim scene firsthand. Pamela Richards, 62, lives close enough to have been affected immediately. “The smell is so bad that I can’t even open my windows,” she said. She described spotting survivors among the dead: “I looked out my window and there was a chicken walking on top of the truck this morning. Some of the chickens are alive and some are dead. I don’t know what to do.”
Eddie Rosenberg, another neighbor, condemned both the treatment of the animals and the attempted concealment. “This is not a way to treat any living organism, it’s horrific,” he said. He added: “I know that this is for a religious ceremony, but this is animal cruelty. The truck was covered by a tarp earlier, they were trying to hide their crimes.”
Robert Lapointe, whose house sits directly behind where one U-Haul was parked, expressed disbelief at the discovery. “I’ve never seen a truck full of dead chickens before,” he said. “I’ve lived in Brooklyn for 35 years.”
The Friday discoveries came as the annual Kaporos period approaches, with Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, falling later this month. Deych’s organization has long campaigned against what they characterize as widespread neglect and suffering tied to the ritual’s mass procurement of birds. The crates found Friday, stacked 10 to 12 high with 10 to 18 chickens each, match descriptions her group has documented in previous years.
Police have not announced any arrests in connection with the abandoned trucks.