VIDEO: Trash Bags Full of Dismembered 'Kaporos' Chickens Spill Onto Brooklyn Street

CYPRESS HILLS, BROOKLYN — Local animal-rights activist Lisa Anne Bakal was walking her dogs near the Cypress Hills exit off Jackie Robinson Parkway one morning this week, she wrote on Facebook, when she made a grisly discovery: Dozens of black garbage bags strewn along the sidewalk, brimming over with hundreds of dead chickens, many of their bodies smashed and/or dismembered.

"I'm really sorry for this beyond horrific image... but this is insanity," Bakal says in a video she recorded at the scene (included above). "This is all over the road. These poor little hens. God."

"You can't imagine what it's like in person," she says. "There's flies everywhere. Everywhere. It's going to be 70 degrees today in New York. This is — I just don't have any words."

The dead birds were apparent casualties of the annual, super-controversial Kaporos ritual, in which Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn (and other parts of the world) grab live chickens by their necks on the eve of the Yom Kippur holiday and twirl them above their heads like propellers — thus, tradition dictates, transferring their sins to the squawking and utterly terrified beasts in their clutches.

Even before they were stuffed into the bags, these little guys were likely covered in their own feces (from long hours in stacked crates) and their own blood (from having their throats slit after the big twirl), according to Nathan Tempey, Gothamist's resident expert on all things Kaporos.

Tempey posted another video Thursday of a couple dozen MORE bags full of chickens being loaded into a garbage truck in Crown Heights. Strangely, in the video, workers with the truck company claim those chickens are headed to a "rendering" plant to be made into biofuel.

The significance of both videos, aside from reminding everyone how nasty this ritual can get, is this: A core argument for upholding the Kaporos tradition is that the chickens are supposedly being eaten for dinner by their twirlers — or, at the very least, sold to the poor.

After observing reality on the ground in Brooklyn, though, Gothamist's Tempey doubts those rules are being followed.

This year, he wrote: "Given the challenges of safely storing and transporting chicken carcasses for human consumption (and the rigorous requirements of the federal Poultry Products Inspection Acts), it seems safe to say that if you don't see some large refrigeration equipment at a kaporos event, the meat is probably not edible, or shouldn't be eaten. Indeed, at this year's large-scale events Monday evening on President Street at Kingston Avenue and on the Eastern Parkway service road, no refrigeration was apparent."

Trash bags full of chickens are a pretty common sight around this time of year in the Crown Heights area, due to the above mentioned Kaporos ceremonies on President Street and Eastern Parkway. The remote, overgrown streets of Cypress Hills, however, where Bakal stumbled across a portion of the Kaporos slaughter this week, are miles from Brooklyn's Orthodox epicenter — meaning someone apparently trucked these chickens out of Crown Heights or Williamsburg and dumped them in a spot where they thought no one would find them.

Homies should have known: Anywhere you go in Brooklyn, you're never far from an animal activist with a smartphone.