LAKEWOOD, Pa. — In the woods here on Tuesday, campers stood in a line holding quails, feeling their warm bodies and beating hearts in their hands.

“Guys, do not bond with your birds,” Hillie Ackerman, 16, a camper from Brooklyn, warned his friends.

The birds were about to be slaughtered.

One by one, the boys handed the quails to a shochet, a Jewish slaughterer, who took a knife, its sharpness tested earlier against his own fingernail, and sliced the birds’ necks.

For a second, each quail shuddered, then went limp. The slaughterer tossed it into a plastic tub that quickly become splattered with blood.