UPC Needs Your Support This Holiday Season

“UPC’s President Karen Davis has done more than perhaps anyone to reveal the complex and socially rich lives of birds. Her writing―intellectually rigorous, passionate, erudite, and witty―brings fully to the fore the great injustices we have perpetrated on these intelligent and loving creatures.” – Marc Bekoff, PhD, Psychology Today, June, 2019: Marc Bekoff Interviews Karen Davis For The Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation

Dear United Poultry Concerns,

“I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you do. I think about chickens, turkeys, and other poultry all the time and how tremendously they suffer in this world. My heart breaks for them every minute. The unrelenting education and rescue work that you do is invaluable and truly makes a monumental difference for these intelligent, sensitive souls.” – Rachel Lang

“Your continuous awareness-changing work and the tender loving care that you give to our feathered friends is awesome. And your Poultry Press Magazine and all it contains is the greatest . . . love the vegan recipes!” – Wandis Wilcox

So this year, despite our official no-chick-hatching policy at our sanctuary, we welcomed an unexpected family of five baby chicks who were sneaked into existence by a hen and a rooster we adopted with 48 others in July 2018 from a cockfighting raid in Virginia Beach. Mother Hen and Brandy Alexander are the parents of this flourishing family who blended in effortlessly with our other chickens, our ducks and our peafowl from the moment they were born, in May this year, in a snug tree hollow that we missed while gathering our hens’ eggs to prevent such surprises.

When I discovered the chicks under the soft breast feathers of their Mother Hen, as I began calling her, I was shocked, but enchanted. What a privilege to observe this hen’s parental care of these tiny peeping souls new to a world they had already come to know intimately as they grew inside their eggs.

My favorite part of their day is in the evenings when they are clamoring for their own branch spaces in the big bush they’re determined to roost in with their elders. A lot of rustling in the leaves! A lot of fuss! Their voices are still young, and they are not quite full grown. They dart through the trees during the day, at once skittish and bold, wary and curious, always watchful, listening, intensely alive.

There are five of them: Kahlua, the rooster, and his sisters: Sprig, Sprout, Sesame, and Dee Dee in lovely feather shades of brown, beige, auburn, gray, and white.

United Poultry Concerns educates people not only about the suffering and abuse of chickens, but about the sweetness, vibrancy, pride, and joy of chickens and our love for them. Our sanctuary is a key part of our mission to advocate for chickens authoritatively based on our personal observations and daily interactions with them.

For every lie their exploiters propagate, we tell the truth.

2020 marks our 30th year since I founded UPC in October of 1990 at a time when some people in the animal advocacy movement cautioned that an organization focusing on chickens and turkeys could not succeed. How wrong they were!

With your caring and generous support, we will advocate relentlessly for chickens, turkeys, ducks and other domestic fowl in 2020 and beyond.

On behalf of every blessed bird on Earth, we thank you for your continuing support for our work, and we wish you joy and prosperity in the year ahead.

Our Work for the Birds Depends on Your Support!

United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization. Federal ID: 52-1705678. All donations are tax-deductible. A financial statement is available on written request to the Office of Consumer Affairs, PO Box 1163, Richmond, Virginia 23218. Our 990 tax forms, Annual Reports & Audits are posted on our website at www.upc-online.org. To view these documents, click on About UPC on our homepage at www.upc-online.org/more_about_upc.html. Thank you.

 

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