Well, actually, I had to speak for him, because all he would say was "Meow."  

But seriously -- a writer from Cat Fancy found his story on my website and called for an interview.  Seems the December issue is going to have a feature article on different religions and their views/beliefs on cats -- and I get to be the Jewish representative.  Oddly, cats are not mentioned in the Tanach ("Old Testament") except for lions and leopards.  But they ARE mentioned in the Talmud -- so I emailed the interviewer some quotes and refs and we followed up with photos of me and Sapphire.

We named him Sapphire because of his beautiful blue eyes.  Our old sheepdog, Grett (show at left, may he rest in peace), led me to him on a very cold winter's day in January a few years ago. It was very clear that the dog wanted me to follow him -- he kept looking at me, then he would walk toward the garage/shed, then look back to me and bark -- so I followed him. There was this poor cat, so cold, hungry, thirsty, and half-starved. Obviously, somebody had abandoned him, mistakenly thinking he could survive in the wild. He was too scared to come into the house with our other cats, but we fed him in the garage, he hunted for rodents down by the chicken coop, and gradually I won his confidence.; He now sleeps on my bed every night. At least, he does unless my 3-year-old grandson is here --then Sapphire "abandons" me for his little friend, and the two look so cute cuddling together! Which leads me to believe that Sapphire must have been a pet raised around children. He's such a gentle, loving animal, and I can't understand how anybody could have just abandoned him like that. He's got a good home with us now. (And yes, we got him neutered).

Another stray named Buffy, who wandered in two years ago, was already neutered.  Definitely somebody's pet, and also good around children.   We advertised about him, but nobody ever claimed him.  So he lives here now, too. 

Why am I getting all this media exposure about my animals lately?  (See also my blog entry "Our Chickens will be movie stars!"  And a few years back WDSE-TV (PBS) in Duluth did a segment on me called "The Rabbi's Garden" that re-runs every spring.)  I think it's because there are so few Hasidic Jews living in the country, that I'm a rare oddity (LOL).  It wasn't always that way -- Hasidism began in rural Eastern Europe.  But in the USA, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews are mostly urban and do not have animals.  So, when nature writers want to be multi-cultural and inclusive of Jews, they search the Net and find my website.   One New Age publication referred to me as "a Jewish St. Francis."  Well, not exactly -- I'm married and have never taken a vow of poverty -- although, the way the economy is going lately, I am de facto living in poverty.  But I do resonate with Francis of Assisi -- a real mensch (Yiddish for "nice person"), IMHO.

Or, some say, he was a turkey -- but I first heard it as a rooster... Besides, I'm not about to call myself a TURKEY!   

The original reference in the story was to the "Indian Cock" which some scholars claim is the turkey (because people apparently mistook it for a peacock) and others say it is the Red Jungle Fowl of India, which is the original ancestor of all breeds of chickens.

Wouldn't this make a really great Purim debate -- was it a turkey or was it a rooster???? We Jews can agree on the big things, such as One God, Ten Commandments... it's those annoying little details that really get us going.

Not to egg you on about this dispute, but folk tales do have a habit of mutating. Did you know that the "goose that laid the golden egg" was originally a chicken, too? So nu, what is this? A revisionist plot to deny chickens their rightful place in history? There's fowl play afoot, that's for sure... Anyway, the exact species of barnyard bird doesn't really affect the story, which I frequently tell, and which is my personal model for teaching Yiddishkeit (Judaism).

Plus, my wife and I like chickens, which we keep as pets on our farm. We also had chickens when we lived in the boundaries of Sandstone. MN -- until the town got uppity and passed an ordinance saying we could not have chickens in the backyard anymore. (My my, aren't we getting gentrified out here -- must be that "huge" population explosion from 1500 to 2500 over the last decade...)

Well, our birds are pets and we refused to kill them or give them away. We finally succeeded in getting them "grandfathered in" and were able to keep them until we moved to the farm in 1997.  Still, there are some folks in town who still think of me as "the guy with that darned rooster!" All this was happening around the time when I opened my website account, so I chose "rooster" and my ID there and well, it grew...  I guess using rooster613 as my nickname is my way of thumbing my nose at a dumb law!

So -- beware of angry roosters -- they use fowl language!

As for the number 613, that refers to the 613 mitzvot (commandments) in the Torah.  (They are communal -- no one person can do all 613, because some are for men, some for women, some for farmers, teachers, merchants, priests, soldiers, or whomever -- ALTOGETHER, the Jewish community has 613 commandments.)  "613" is a shorthand way that many Jews use on the Net to let each other know that they are Orthodox or Hasidic, similar to the way Christians use WWJD to identify themselves to each other.    BTW, I own the domain name "rooster613.com" which used to point to my website, but now points to my ebay store -- The Happy Rooster!  

OK, so maybe you've read in my eBay store that our chicken feathers are "cruelty-free." 

What, exactly, does that mean? 

To understand the term, you need to know something about the way commercial poultry is raised nowadays, because most of the feathers on the market are meat industry by-products and definitely NOT cruelty-free.  Chickens in commercial farms are raised so tightly crowded together -- often several hens crammed into a small cage that is stacked on other cages -- that the top half of their beaks must be cut off or they will literally peck each other to death out of frustration.  A hen's beak is very sensitive.  She uses it not only to eat, but to explore things around her.   Cutting off her beak would be analous to cutting off your finger tips.  Not only can the hen not peck other hens, she can't pick up solid things to eat, so she is fed ground-up chicken feed that contains, among other things, animal by-products such as feathers, bones, trimmings from packing plants, etc.  Think "Mad Chicken Disease" -- it's bound to happen someday, because feeding animal "by-products" to chickens is no more natural than feeding sheep parts to cows (which is how BSE -- Mad Cow Disease -- got started.  And the deadly H5N1 bird flu began NOT with wild birds, but in the crowded conditions of Chinese factory farms -- but that's a whole other blog....) 

Once that factory-farm chicken has either stopped laying or reached the desired meat size, it is slaughtered.  The average commercial meat chicken lives 42 days, egg-layers maybe 9 months to a year.   In contrast to this, our chickens live 8-12 years and they run free, either in big roomy outdoor pens or literally free-range in the fields and woods.  We rotate which flock goes totally free each day to keep certain roosters from fighting, but in the summertime, everybody gets to go outside every day.   In winter they need to stay inside the poultry house when it's below zero (Fahrenheit), but  no chicken here is ever crammed into a "battery hen" cage.  If a cage is necessary for safety (such as for isolating a sick or injured bird, or a mother hen with eggs or very young chicks), it's a nice, roomy, airy cage with straw on the floor, plenty of room to peck, scratch, and flap wings.  In some cases, it can also be a cage with no bottom, set outside over grass to eat, or dirt for the bird(s) to dustbathe.   But as much as possible, we let our birds run free in flocks, to eat bugs, seeds, greens -- their natural diet -- in addition to grains that we give them.  (At night, they come inside the coop to roost, and I shut the doors to keep predators out.)

We also do not slaughter.  As an ovo-lacto vegetarian household, we do eat eggs, but not the birds.  Even after a hen stops producing eggs, she still gives us feathers to sell, manure for the compost pile, insect control (they LOVE those grasshoppers!)  and the pleasure of having them around.  So here at the Gershom place, there's no such thing as an "unproductive" hen.   Granted, not all of our hens are named, but all are treated as individuals just the same.   One old hen whom we did name -- Mama Hen -- is now 8 years old and rarely lays an egg anymore, but she is a reliable mother who hatches out chicks every year, and teaches them all the skills they need to forage.   I like to think of her as an old grandmother with a lot of child-rearing experience!  She is far more valuable in this role than she would be as a pot of soup.

What about the roosters from these batches of chicks?  As much as possible, I try to keep them.   Contrary to popular belief, you CAN have more than one rooster in a flock if they are raised together and get along.   Granted, they don't produce eggs, but they do give me absolutely beautiful feathers to sell.  (When was the last time you actually saw one of those mettallic green tail feathers so often depicted in rooster artwork?)   And they help protect the hens -- a rooster is constantly on the lookout for predators and will alert the flock.   Occasionally we do have a rooster who is too aggressive for our flocks or the people here.  (A bird who attacks small children, for example, can be dangerous.)  In this case, I try to give him to someone else who needs a new rooster for their flock, and I suppose he might end up as somebody's dinner someday -- but at least he had a life first.  Contrast that with male chicks in many commercial hatcheries, which are simply thrown alive into plastic bags.  When the bag is full, the top is closed, the chicks smother, and are later ground up as more of those "animal by-products" I mentioned above.  I cannot even imagine doing such a cruel thing to a newborn baby bird.

So what does "cruelty-free" mean to me?  It means that each and every animal on our little hobby farm is treated with the gentleness, love, and respect due to one of God's creatures.  They are all treated as individuals, with their separate personalities and quirks.  When you buy from us, you are helping to feed and care for these wonderful birds, and support compassion over cruelty.   (No, we are not a charity, just a hard-working multi-species family.)  In future blogs, I'll be writing more about my chickens and their individual stories.  

On June 6, 2006, film director Lionel Friedberg came to our farm to interview me and film our geese and chickens for a documentary being produced by the Jewish Vegetarians of North America.(JVNA).    Friedberg has produced films for the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, PBS, etc. so this was a real honor.   The working title of the film is "Our Sacred Duty:  The Jewish Mandate to Heal the Earth" and will cover Jewish teachings on ecology, non-violence, vegetarianism, etc.   Footage has been shot in the USA and Israel (and maybe elsewhere?) and will include a number of prominent rabbis, scholars, animal welfare activists, vegetarians, etc.  I got involved both because I'm on the advisory committee of JVNA and because I'm a Hasidic Jew living in the country.   (Nowadays, most Hasidim are urban people, but tihs was not always the case.  Hasidim in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe lived mostly in small rural villages.)  I also got involved in this film because I beleive it is very important for people to know that there ARE Jews who care about peace, the environment, civil rights, etc.  (Right now, the only images of us that people see are from the war between Israel and Lebanon -- but I won't go into my rant about that!) 

Luckily we did the filming BEFORE the heatwave and drought hit Minnesota, when everything was still lush and green.  One of my hens, whom I call Mama Hen (because she is the BEST mother and just loves to raise chicks) had a 3-week-old brood of four.  They were just the right age to be little movie stars -- old enough to be outside without risk of getting chilled (yes, it actually was CHILLY back then!) but still young and cute enough to be just adorable.  We did a sequence where I carried the chicken family out into the yard in a cage that, I explained, was the size of a battery hen cage, where chickens on factory farms spend their entire lives.  Then I opened the cage and let them all go free to scratch, peck follow their mother around.  We also filmed some of our adult chickens eating out of my hand, etc. And we filmed the geese -- who were very wary of this stranger pointing a camera at them, so the only goose who would eat out of my hand on camera was Lewis the grey and white gander who supplies the fake eagle feathers I  sell on ebay.  But we got shots of the others running and flapping their wings, swimming, etc. 

The interview part  was done indoors and covered my philosophy on how Jewish mysticism fits with vegetarianism, some Hasidic teachings about animals, etc.  Of course, I don't know how much of all this will actually get on screen -- but it was exciting and fun to do.  The film will be rleased on DVD and when it is, naturally I will have them in my store.  Meanwhile, if you are interested in Jewish vegetarianism, I recommend visiting the JVNA website at JewishVeg.org -- Enjoy!