Animal rights activists who interrupted a Purim party at Urban Adamah’s Berkeley farm last weekend said they were protesting the Jewish organization’s kosher slaughter of chickens raised there.
Urban Adamah defended the killing of the 18 chickens, saying they had come to the end of their egg-laying days and were slaughtered to provide meat for members of the Berkeley community.
The activist group, calling itself Jewish Animal Liberationists, slipped onto the farm during a Purim celebration wearing funeral attire and holding signs condemning the killings and calling for sanctuary for the birds. The group claimed that Urban Adamah “abruptly and without notice killed all chickens on the farm.”
“Gratuitous killing isn’t a Jewish value. These are young, healthy chickens who could live and be loved for another five or 10 years on sanctuaries,” said Amy Halpern-Laff, a spokeswoman for the group.
Adam Berman, who founded Urban Adamah in 2010 and is the group’s executive director, said “the synergy of plants and animals together are crucial elements of what creates an ecological farm, so Urban Adamah has animals for that reason.”
“Many people in the Urban Adamah community eat meat, and our ability to provide them meat that was raised in humane ways feels like a gift for the people who live in our community,” he said, adding that most of the meat will be served to local residents who come to the farm for free food.
It was not the first clash between animal rights supporters and Urban Adamah. Three years ago, activists forced cancellation of a public chicken slaughter workshop at the Berkeley farm, though the 15 birds were killed days later. Their meat was used to make soup, which was given away for free.
Berman said the farm raises its chickens “so they grow up together every 2-3 years.”
“Eighteen chickens had stopped laying, so we killed them at that point,” he said, “and now we’re raising the next flock, which will also be killed when they stop laying eggs.”
Great work! History is on the side of the victims and on the side of justice- not needless violence.
chickens are not victims…they are food
Dogfighting dogs are not victims…they are entertainment
Correction. Chickens are often killed and consumed as food, but that does not define what they are. Humans can be killed and consumed as food, too, and some populations do exactly that. Our digestive systems are as adaptable as our social mores.
@disqus_BSaBR1mgCk:disqus Plants are beings too, beings who want to live. Do you eat plants, Matt?
Plants don’t want anything, and I don’t want pseudoscience.
Plants turn to follow the light. They want light. They extend rootlets toward water. They want water. Plants extend roots into soil. They want minerals. What @disqus_BSaBR1mgCk:disqus wants is to maintain a simplistic moral view in a world that contradicts it.
Is pulling a weed the same thing as stabbing a dog? Nobody is living this way. Show me the science that plants “want” anything at all. They are highly complex, but not aware.
You’re desperately grasping for anything to cling to the violent, oppressive ideology you were born with. You will go down in history much like my racist and homophobic grandparents. Human psychology is such that it generally requires older generations to die off for the open-minded younger folks to step up without being bogged down by such pride.
@disqus_BSaBR1mgCk:disqus. Now you’re just ranting. Please show me where it is written on the sky that “awareness” is sacred rather than that life is? It is an arbitrary standard invented by you and your colleagues.
Let me disabuse your youthful ignorance of what is involved. I had the good fortune to take a course in molecular biology in the early 1990’s when the field was just being invented. At the time the only genome that had been analyzed was that of the bacterium e. coli. Bacteria are prokaryotes, with cells a thousandth the size and a thousandth the complexity of eukaryotic cells like yeast or plants or animals.
I was astonished an impressed how complicated and elaborate the genetic structure of e. coli is. Imagine if you will a combination of an immense Rube Goldberg machine with a thousand interworking parts, parts made of polished ebony, ivory, porcelain, and diamonds, each themselves an elaborate machine. And all of it at a scale visible not in microscopes but in electron microscopes.
You know how you feel when you read of ISIS destroying museums full of art objects that have survived thousands of years down to our times? That feeling of hatred and revulsion for their wanton destruction of beautiful treasures?
That is how you should be feeling when you learn of the destruction of any bacterium, let alone a eukaryote. Every time you so much as brush your teeth you destroy millions upon millions of these spectacular beautiful mechanisms.
Yet you have no choice. You are doing a million-fold what ISIS did to the Baghdad Museum and to the Palmyra Museum every time you brush your teeth or scratch your head, let alone eat anything. It is like bombing the Louvre.
It took me a long time to reconcile myself to nature’s casual vandalism and mindless destructiveness of such stunningly beautiful elaborate jewels. But nature is so boundlessly creative and complex that it can do it and do it and do it, and keep on doing it for literally billions of years, with every greater elaborations, complexities, and profusions.
But in the end it makes no difference whether I (or you) can reconcile myself to that destructiveness nor whether I can grasp the billions of years of ever more-elaborate creative profusion that we see around us and in the fossil record. It is just there, vast and complex beyond our ken. [What we think or feel about it is irrelevant EXCEPT insofar as our actions or inactions damage the biosphere permanently.]. We call that wanton, endlessly repeated destruction of the beautiful, the elaborate, the intricate, ‘death’.
Your arbitrary choice of the standard of awareness or sentience in the face of all that living things are and become and being angry and indignant about it is wrongheaded. It is equally wrong to destroy a bacterium as a chicken. But you cannot avoid doing either.
In the end death comes for us all, both bacteria and chickens, protestors and scoffers.
that was beautiful
I usually don’t laugh condescendingly at people like you, but has it ever, even once, crossed your mind that your “racist and homophobic” grandparents (and I) were once just as young and rebellious and self-righteous and full of themselves as you are now? And that the way they (and I) got from the radical ideas they had then to the ideas they have now was by a process known as “learning”? My father once told me that if a man is not a socialist when he is twenty, he has no heart. And that if he was still a socialist at forty he has no head. Get yourself a diary and a fountain pen and a bottle of ink and write down in detail what your ideas and ideology are. Be very sure to date it. Read it again in 20 years. It will be good for a laugh.
there is a big difference between cutting a carrot and cutting a terrified animal that wants to live and can feel pain and emotions. And you know that Jackkessler.
Actually that is not true. It is easier to project your feelings and emotions onto animals but if we use our brains and not just our emotions then nothing is left of your argument.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-startling-intelligence-of-the-common-chicken/
Think chicken: Think intelligent, caring and complex …
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170103091955.htm
jackkessler, did you read the articles I posted the links for?
Don’t tell him that. These Animal Rights PETAporn freaks only like animals when they’re victims.
Although I applaud the moral urgency of the protestors, the work that Urban Adamah does is vitally important, especially in a time when so many people are divorced from husbandry.
The environmentalist and essayist Robert Kimber described the moral hunter as someone who is “deeply conscious of the paradox inherent in killing these creatures he loves and respects.” That rings true, and the same is true of the moral farmer. Slaughtering a chicken is an emotional, bloody act…and a morally complex one that can actually increase empathy and respect for other species.
As Michael Pollan wrote, “Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.”
their “moral urgency” is immoral and jew hating
How so? These are clearly Jews who are also animal rights activists. If you’re suggesting that animal rights activists are necessarily Jew haters (self-hating or otherwise), I think you have a mountain to climb to demonstrate that.
gee don’t tell my grandmother who chopped the head off of a chicken as clean as can be .. no blood at all.. and DELICIOUS
My grandfather was a kosher butcher. My father knew a great cut of meat. So glad I grew up normal. Don’t know what happened to these freaks.
Your grandmother (and all our grandmothers) had no idea that we can be healthy living plant-based lives, nor that chickens are indeed sentient beings who value their own lives as we do ours.
I’ve killed a lot of chickens myself and I assure you, even for those who have done it countless times, it isn’t always bloodless. Your comment suggests you haven’t done the work yourself.
This seems like exactly what this farm does. So how do you applaud the protesters?
It is exactly what the farm does, I agree, and that’s why I admire Urban Adamah’s mission and work.
Nevertheless, I respect the fact that the protestors are driven by compassion for other species. While I disagree with their specific conclusions, it seems to me that the people who react with derision and/or anger to animal rights activism – those who are most dismissive of it – fall into two categories: 1) those who live unexamined lives and, like many of the activists, embrace simple answers to complex questions; 2) those who eat meat and fish, but would be unable to take the life of another animal themselves. I lack respect for both camps.
There are no moral hunters. Hunting is a sport. Killing for sport is a horror that should be punished the same way other wantonly destructive behavior is punished. Hunting is as moral as vandalizing a hospital.
Some hunters are trophy hunters, yes, and that’s a “pasttime” that’s impossible to defend on moral/ethical grounds, but hunters who eat the animals they hunt – yes, they do have the moral high ground over the many people who outsource the bloody work of killing the chickens, cows, or fish they eat to poorer populations who often carry out the killing in inhumane ways.
Quite the contrary. The only hunters to whom that applies are the few dozens of Stone Age subsistence hunters left in the world. Everyone else has access to the global food market. That market offers domesticated plant and animal food for a small fraction the cost in effort of hunting wild animals. Domestic animals are produced by the rancher. Only the original unmodified genome ever existed in nature. Every other particle of the domesticated animal’s being is put there by the rancher. Having created them, the rancher has considerable claims on them. The hunter who kills wild animals, even under the transparently false pretense that it is done for food, has no such claims. He has no more right to kill them than they have to kill him. Less, because the animals are not lying about their motives.
Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree, Jack.
Personally, I find the concept of humans outsourcing the reaponsibility of killing to industrial operations (your championed “global food market”) to be morally repugnant. That conviction was a significant part of the reason I adopted the diet I have subscribed to for over a decade – I’m a strict vegetarian unless I have killed the creature I consume (or I know the person well who did the killing).
You point out that the “global food market” offers domesticated food at a “fraction of the cost.” True, the financial cost to a consumer of a Perdue chicken is lower than that of a chicken sold by a small farm (and incomparable to the investment of time, energy, and care put out by the likes of Urban Adamah), but I wonder if you’ve spent time in a chicken processing plant or ever interacted with the workers there. If you have, you should be aware of the psychological toll of that kind of work (which, for the record, was a primary source of employment in the rural Virginia county I grew up in). Because you clearly don’t appreciate how high the moral costs are, I must presume you’ve no experience with killing carried out by yourself or someone close to you.
Your claim that the rancher has “created” the animals he or she raises because the current genome of the creatures is so far removed from their ancestors’ “unmodified genome” flies in the face of evolutionary biology. Generations of genetic drift and husbandry ain’t new creation – modified or not, that’s just life at work (unless you insist that humans are outside nature).
That is a cop-out. You are not strict at all. Some of my friends are fruitarians. They do not eat anything killed. Fruits and seeds can be gathered and eaten without killing the plants that grew them. Non-fertile eggs can be eaten. Even meat can be eaten if one can find a source for cattle afterbirths. Milk and milk products can be eaten so long as the calf is not killed for veal.
If you are against killing, then don’t do it. But spare us your pious rationalizations about “sentience” and “awareness”.
A cop out? Pious rationalizations? (weary chuckle)
I never wrote anything about “sentience” or “awareness,” and I’m not at all against killing, Jack – as a hunter, how could I claim as much? I do feel the need to be responsible for the killing of any creature I eat, however. To be against killing and still buy meats that others have killed is what I take issue with…but this is getting far afield from the issue of protestors targeting Urban Adamah.
In any case, I come across a lot of your comments on the “J” threads, Jack, and you make a habit of posting things that are both dismissive and negative. You often attack the author of a piece you’re responding to or rage against other commentors. I wonder if you’d be so strident in person? Although I’ve only had the opportunity to do so twice, I’ve found that people who have fumed against my position in online threads have dramatically changed their tune when I sat down with them in person. Whether that was simply because the veil of anonymity was removed or because they came to begrudgingly respect my opinion, I can’t say, but, if you’re in the Bay Area, I’d be happy to take you out for a drink and we can hash this out in a more civilized manner.
If I thought railing at you in person would make you stop hunting, I would do it. If I thought polite wheedling would work better, I would do that. Eventually there will be an initiative measure on the state ballot and we will make it a felony to deliberately kill a wild animal except in self-defense and we will make even that defense all but impossible to use.
So I guess you have no interest in sitting at a table with me for a drink, then?
At any rate, elsewhere in this thread you wax poetic about the violence of nature and its astonishing variety of forms, a “creative profusion” often arrived at via violence/destruction, in order to make the case for meat eating. Fine; I share your enthusiasm for nature’s ambivalent incomprehensibility (much like G-d’s). Yet you reject hunting and defend industrialized agriculture? That makes little sense to me.
The day that the law you describe above becomes the law of the land, you can be sure eating chicken will also be outlawed. Indeed, it’s possible those laws will come to pass…and we’ll be the Eloi, waiting to be taken by the Morlocks.
Actually the reason I seem confused is that reality keeps knocking over my attempts to make sense of it. One of my most dissonant experiences was a summer bicycling up the Dalton Highway during caribou season. As you know I consider hunting to be only just short of murder for laughs. And yet the caribou hunters were generally sweet kind young people. One middle aged couple I met I already knew from meeting them earlier on the Alaska Highway. The wife was an ER nurse in Anchorage. The husband was a director of a religious nonprofit which raised money for, and ran, a free clinic in Ghana. They frequently flew there to oversee it. Stan lent me their house in Anchorage and mentioned that I was welcome to his whiskey. After drinking it, I had to leave an even fancier scotch. I wondered if Stan saw that coming and… And yet they were all out on the tundra using high-powered rifles to punch holes in innocent caribou. I am old and I know character when I see it. And I know a massacred caribou when I see it, too. As they say about quantum mechanics, if you think you understand it, that is pretty much a guarantee that you don’t.
Your nod to dissonance and lovely anecdote are a nice way to close our debate, Jack. On at least two things, we wholeheartedly agree: 1) People are complicated and often contradictory; 2) scotch is a first-rate thank you gift…meant to be shared.
chickens are food
the protestors are loony jew haters
WILL THE ADL CALL THEM OUT?????
First, chickens are individual beings who want to live, no different from your cat or dog.
Second, as the article clearly states, the protestors are part of a group called JEWISH Animal Liberationists. This is a Jewish-led initiative, NOT an act of anti-Semitism. It is members of the Jewish community questioning the status quo, fighting against tza’ar ba’alei chayim, and trying to create a world that embodies progressive Jewish values.
how do you know what chickens want?
Al Smith, how do you know what dogs want? Chickens are like us and dogs. they are social, have feelings, want to live, like to play, like to be near their loved ones. They feel fear, and pain. And studies are showing that their ability to think is more like humans than like our dogs, not to disparage dogs who I love, but chickens are thinking, feeling non humans who look a lot different than us. So some humans don’t care how they feel and what they want.
I do know my dogs want meat.. also my cats cannot live without it.. so when they eat something has to die. that would happen if they were pets or wild.I do not know if my dogs want to live or die.. just as you have no idea if a fish or chicken wants to live or die and news for you chickens are nothing like humans.. neither are dogs or cats they kill with impunity.. want to be”near their loved ones” ? LOL yes dog cats chickens et all are happy to “love their loved ones” through incest .. roosters will breed anything as will dogs and cats.. can’t love dogs and still want one as a pet unless you are willing to kill for your dog or cat or have someone else do it for you ( like I do)
My dogs have been happy as vegans. They have been healthy and live a but longer than their breed’s life span. Cats, I don’t know. But in the near future, “cultured meat” will be a cruelty free way to feed cats. Chickens think a lot like humans and they have all the emotions. They make very loving pets. That is why they are being used by science for certain things. In any case, just because animals kill for what ever reason, it doesn’t mean we have to. We shouldn’t be adding to the misery in the universe.
@sapphirefein:disqus Plants are also individual being who want to live, also no different than chickens. Do you eat plants, Sapphire?
Except Hashem told us that we can eat animals and arguably that we should. This seems to be a point on which progressive and Jewish are at odds.
The protesters are Jews, working to effect change in their beloved community. That is our strength; the willingness to be self-critical.
You sound a lot more self-righteous than self-critical.
Thank you, Jewish Animal Liberationists for being a voice for the animals. Your peaceful disruption points out that eating animals involves violence. Education, dialogue, and meaningful actions open new ways of thinking. The choice to live peacefully with the other sentient beings on earth is always our choice.
Judy99, plants are also living beings who want to live. Do you eat plants Judy?
You’re conflating being alive with being sentient.
On what part of the sky is it written that only sentient beings are entitled to life? That is an arbitrary standard you and your colleagues made up. Why is a chicken more entitled to life than a majestic redwood that may live two thousand years?
Jackkessler, I discussed your point with my pet cabbage and my pet lettuce and they agreed that anyone who equates a plant and an animal needs to have their ‘head’ examined.
“Abruptly and without notice” Notice to whom? Their next of kin? Would it have been better if the chickens had been killed slowly and agonizingly rather than abruptly? Should they have been able to retain lawyers? :o)
Apparently, without notice to community members who had been promised the chickens would not be killed imminently.
What difference would notice have made if the outcome were the same?
These are bodies, not presents! If the idea is to give a “gift” to the community, I can think of a thousand gifts that don’t involve killing sentient creatures.
Okay, so we have perforce moved the bar from “living”, down to “wanting to live”. And moved it again to “sentience”. You are under anesthesia while having your appendix out and the surgeon finds out during the operation that your health insurance has lapsed and that the she won’t be paid. Is she within her rights to kill you then and there? Should the doctors have pulled the plug on Karen Ann Quinlan who was in permanent vegetative state from which she would never recover? Rather than just harass you with examples, I will tell you the answer. Which is that you are trying to make simple a question which is not even close to being simple.
I think that is so disrespectful to Urban Adamah, if you choose not to kill animals and eat meat, that is your right, but don’t crash someone else’s Purim party and tell them what to do.
Fundamentalists of all sorts when they think they are the only ones whose opinions matter are toxic when they start enforcing their beliefs on others, including animal rights activists.
It is not your right to kill a sentient being. It is hubris. Eat what ever you want, just don’t kill or hurt anyone.
Don’t kill sentient beings when they stop laying as many eggs! They still have a life to live. It is written, I think in the Talmud, that to kill anyone is to destroy a universe. That includes non humans! You may say it is a tradition, but traditions change. If you don’t need to kill to be happy and healthy, why on earth would you?