Berkeley, CA - Urban Adamah, a Jewish community center and urban farm in Berkeley, has announced it will kill the center’s 2-year-old hens because the hens’ egg production has begun to wane after coming to the farm in 2011. Instead of retiring the hens to sanctuaries that are ready to take them, the community center has announced a killing of the hens in a class on kosher slaughter on Sunday, May 4.

United Poultry Concerns, a national nonprofit organization and sponsor of International Respect for Chickens Day, which happens to fall on May 4, has offered to drive the hens to sanctuaries in the Bay Area where they will live out their days peacefully. After years of service and egg-laying, these hens deserve to be retired to the sanctuaries that eagerly await them.

Sadly, each hen had a photograph with her name on the Urban Adamah website until these kindly expressions of affection were removed in response to the outcry against the hens’ needless slaughter. The hens have been part of the center’s farm family, educating the community and its children about the endearing personalities and trusting friendliness of chickens. On its website, the center cites a commitment to “love, compassion, and justice.” This commitment sounds hollow in view of the needless violence that is being planned.

“Slaughtering these hens simply because they no longer lay enough eggs is an insult to the females of any species,” says Karen Davis, president of United Poultry Concerns. “Two-year-old hens are young and healthy, and there is no justification at all for the community center to kill them, especially when loving homes are waiting. Rather, the community center should gratefully grant these hens the love, compassion, and justice it movingly proclaims.”

United Poultry Concerns is partnering with Jewish Vegetarians of North America and Bay Area activists to stage a protest demonstration on Sunday morning at Urban Adamah starting at 9am. They will bring carriers for the hens in the hope that the community center will choose to show mercy and allow the hens to live with people who will value them as fellow beings who love their lives, as we love our own.

“The righteous person considers the life of his or her animal” -Proverbs 12:10. We urge Urban Adamah to save the lives of these hens.

May 4 is International Respect for Chickens Day and May is International Respect for Chickens Month. For information, contact United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. http://www.upc-online.org