#kapparot

First we feed them to the fish

Then we wave them around our head and donate them

Then we annul them

And then we smash them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapparot

Jewish scholars in the ninth century explained that since the Hebrew word גבר means both "man" and "rooster", a rooster may substitute as a religious and spiritual vessel in place of a man.

Because Hebrew has homonyms, you can outsmart “god” by torturing a chicken to make it atone for your sins, and he’s either too stupid to tell the difference, or too disengaged to mind in the slightest.

Jewish woman performs the kapparot ceremony before Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv, Israel; 1960. x

The kapparot ceremony customarily involves the swinging of a chicken above ones’ head while one recites a prayer symbolically transferring ones’ ‘sins’ for the year to the chicken.  This ceremony takes place the day before Yom Kippur.  After the ceremony is complete, the chicken is slaughtered and given to families in need free of charge.  Although a chicken is customarily used, it is not mandatory and some choose to donate money to charity in place of the chicken.

Judd and Jackson: The Roosters with Many Lives

The odds against Judd and Jackson’s survival were astronomical — but today, these Southern California Shelter residents are not only surviving, but thriving.

These handsome boys started their lives in a commercial hatchery charged with hatching female chickens who would be used for egg production at a commercial egg-laying facility. Judd and Jackson are likely Miller’s Champion Brown Leghorns — a type of chicken specifically genetically bred for maximum egg production. 

As boy chicks at a commercial hatchery, Judd and Jackson would ordinarily have suffered the typical fate of their male cohort — death in an unimaginably awful way, either by being ground alive in a macerator, suffocated along with thousands of other chicks in a giant trash bag, suffocated by carbon monoxide, electrocuted, or having their necks broken. All of these methods of culling day-old male chicks are legal standard operating practice in the egg laying industry. Since males do not lay eggs, they are considered to be of no value to the industry and are killed because of that economic "worthlessness.”  

“Who, me? Worthless?!? Pshaw.”  —Jackson

Though Judd and Jackson were males born into the egg-laying industry, they avoided the fate of being brutally killed on their first day of life through a stroke of luck: They were improperly sexed. Sexing chicks is not a science, so occasionally a stray male chick makes it through the culling process. What makes Judd and Jackson’s tale so unusual is that the male and female chicks of their breed are differently colored, which generally leaves no margin for sexing error. Yet Judd and Jackson were not culled. (The only plausible conclusion is that they were shrouded in a cloak of invisibility at the time. Nothing else makes sense.)

Once through the gantlet of male chick death, these two boys were treated as if they were females entering the egg-laying industry (since they were believed to be) and debeaked (another standard industry practice) to prepare them for a shortened life spent in intense confinement in a battery cage. While their bodies were being mutilated, no one noticed that these boys were, in fact, boys. Mutilation complete, they continued to be treated as soon-to-be hens.

Eventually, though, somewhere in the process, the biological truth was discovered: Judd and Jackson would never lay eggs. They were discarded by the egg industry, but they weren’t immediately killed. Instead, remarkably, the next leg of their journey found them shoved into crates along with thousands of “spent” hens — hens considered valueless by the industry because their most productive egg-laying days are behind them (typically at approximately 18 months to two years of age) — headed to be slaughtered as part of a kapporot ceremony.