UPC Supports Opposition to Chicken Slaughterhouse in Alexandria, Virginia

This is NOT A

“MORE HUMANE WAY OF PUTTING FOOD ON THE TABLE.”

Alexandria, VA residents are debating whether a Halal chicken slaughterhouse (live poultry market) should be granted a special use permit by the City Council in this Washington, DC suburb. As described in Chicken slaughterhouse divides Alexandria residents, businesses on WTOP.com: “The way it would work is customers would be able to choose a chicken, and they can watch the way the animal is butchered and prepared.”

The Alexandria City Council is scheduled to vote on the permit at its next legislative meeting Tuesday, March 26. If you live in Northern Virginia or Washington, DC, you can express your opposition to the chicken slaughterhouse here: City of Alexandria Mayor & City Council. To reach the Mayor and Members of City Council, call 703.746.4500, or send a group e-mail to the Mayor and Members of City Council. To email a Member individually, use the links within each bio.

UPC Letter to the Alexandria, VA Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City Council, March 18, 2019:

United Poultry Concerns, Inc.

PO Box 150, Machipongo, VA 23405-0150

Phone: 757-678-7875 • FAX: 757-678-5070

www.upc-online.org • info@upc-online.org

Attention: Mayor Justin M. Wilson, Vice Mayor Elizabeth B. Bennett-Parker, and Alexandria City Council Members

Regarding: Proposed Halal Chicken Slaughter Operation

Dear Mayors and City Council Members:

I am writing to you respectfully to urge you not to grant a special permit for a chicken slaughter operation at 3225 Colvin Street in Alexandria.

Despite the Saba Live Poultry business staff’s assertion that all the trash and garbage will be stored indoors at all times, this business will truck live birds to the facility. There will be birds crowded in cages in what is most likely to be a putrid smelling interior, as is typical of all the live poultry markets I personally have visited in New York City and that have been visited and recorded by others. These places are filled with birds who typically come from suppliers who round them up from various locations and often these birds are sick and dying with undiagnosed (and of course untreated) illnesses. But even if they are healthy, they must sit in their cages and listen all day long to the cries and screams of the other birds who are having their throats cut.

Please understand that throat-cutting of a living creature including a chicken is NOT humane and that the language of “humane” to describe this process cheapens the word “humane” and falsifies the experience the birds are enduring. This includes the painful, terrifying experience of a knife blade close to the face and cutting into the sensitive skin and trachea and other parts of the innervated face, throat and neck area. It includes the cruelty of making birds awaiting their own deaths listen to the killing being conducted over and over. So forget “humane.”

Live poultry markets are not clean places regardless of how much rhetoric is expended to say that they are. The smell of blood and suffering is strong, and most frequently, the birds do not have fresh clean food or water in their cages, adding to the inhumanness of these places which always includes rough handling.

And what happens to the birds who are not slaughtered and sold to customers? How are they disposed of along with the daily mess of entrails, blood and other body parts of birds who are slaughtered? And where do the birds come from to begin with? Where do they originate? How long before their arrival at the killing facility were they deprived of food and water?

I am speaking for the birds and for those residents who justifiably do not want a chicken/poultry slaughterhouse in their neighborhood. The industrialized poultry industry is 100 percent cruel, filthy, and inhumane, but so are these live poultry operations, which are simply extensions of factory farming rather than “alternatives.”

Please reject the proposal that a bird-killing operation be established in Alexandria. Thank you for your attention. I will be happy to speak with you further upon your request.

Sincerely,

Karen Davis, PhD, President United Poultry Concerns

PO Box 150

Machipongo, VA 23405

Office: 757-678-7875

Website: www.upc-online.org

Live Poultry Markets Webpage:

Live Markets