NYC Health Commissioner Mary Bassett Misleads Public About Legality of Kaporos Chicken Massacre
Animals: Tradition - Philosophy

FROM

TheirTurn.net
October 2017

“As the Commissioner of the DOH, Dr. Bassett knows that erecting pop-up slaughterhouses on public streets and contaminating residential neighborhoods with the blood and body parts of thousands of animals violate public health codes and put area residents at risk,” said Cynthia King, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed against the city. “I wonder if she would be more inclined to enforce the law if dead animals contaminated the streets in her neighborhood.”

In response to accusations from protesters that she has failed to enforce the seven public health codes that are violated during an annual Yom Kippur ritual sacrifice (Kaporos), NYC’s Dept of Health (DOH) Commissioner, Mary Bassett, told an audience at Columbia University that “this has been litigated in the courts” and that “there is a court decision that stands that governs our position on this matter.”

The protesters, some of whom live in neighborhoods where the killings take place, say that she misled the audience because the court case, which is ongoing, centers on whether or not city officials are required to enforce laws, not on whether or not the laws are being violated. In fact, in the lower court proceedings, city attorneys have not disputed the plaintiffs’ claims that laws are violated. They have merely argued that city agencies – not the courts – should determine which laws are enforced and how.

In her remarks to the audience, Commissioner Bassett also falsely stated, “We have no disease signals associated with this practice.” Upon reviewing the video footage of Commissioner Bassett’s statement, Nora Constance Marino, the attorney representing the plaintiffs who are suing the city, said, “An affidavit from a toxicologist that was submitted to the court does, in fact, show a multitude of public health risks.”

“As the Commissioner of the DOH, Dr. Bassett knows that erecting pop-up slaughterhouses on public streets and contaminating residential neighborhoods with the blood and body parts of thousands of animals violate public health codes and put area residents at risk,” said Cynthia King, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed against the city. “I wonder if she would be more inclined to enforce the law if dead animals contaminated the streets in her neighborhood.”

Commissioner Basset made the misleading public statements about Kaporos as protesters, angry that she has ignored community’s pleas to enforce the law, disrupted a presentation she was making at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

BACKGROUND

Kaporos is a annual ritual in which ultra-Orthodox Jews swing chickens around their heads on public streets while saying a prayer to transfer their sins to the animals. After the ritual, they give the chickens to a butcher who slices their throats in makeshift slaughterhouses erected in several neighborhoods in NYC. The ritual is performed prior to Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. In Brooklyn, which is home to hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews, an estimated 60,000 chickens are swung and massacred each year.

In 2015, Alliance to End Chickens as Kaporos as well as 19 NYC residents sued the NYC Department of Health and NYPD for failing to enforce the 15 public health, sanitation and anti-cruelty laws and regulations that are violated during Kaporos. The case is pending in New York’s Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.

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