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Gruesome Trend of Selling Colored Baby Chicks In Lebanon Needs to Be Stopped
It is Easter time again, and with that comes the barbaric trend of the selling of colored baby chicks around Lebanon.
If you’ve lived in Lebanon for a while, you’ve seen it before. Baby chicks are stuffed into small cardboard or plastic boxes, suffocated of air and forced to stumble over each other, as they are advertised for sale on the most traffic-jammed streets of Lebanon in scorching hot heat. What’s worse is that these chicks are often dyed a range of neon Easter colors, in a gruesome dying technique showcased below.
Once they’re bought, these baby chicks are often smothered and squeezed by children, and they often die after a few days from overexposure to toxic chemicals used in the dyes, neglect, or being mishandled by the children who they have been gifted to. Oftentimes these chicks are too young to be separated from their mothers, so their death is not even a case of the added factor of mishandling, but it is determined from the day they are snatched from their nests.
Despite the fact that the former Governor of Beirut, Ziad Chebib, banned the selling of these chicks in Beirut in 2015, and the reaffirmation of this ban in accordance with a drafted Animal Welfare and Protection Law, you’ll still find people selling them on streets both inside and outside of Beirut.
If you see someone selling baby chicks this season, whether colored or uncolored, we urge you not to buy them and we ask that you help spread awareness about the barbarity of this pointless holiday trend in hopes that it will one day be completely banned in Lebanon.
If you’ve lived in Lebanon for a while, you’ve seen it before. Baby chicks are stuffed into small cardboard or plastic boxes, suffocated of air and forced to stumble over each other, as they are advertised for sale on the most traffic-jammed streets of Lebanon in scorching hot heat. What’s worse is that these chicks are often dyed a range of neon Easter colors, in a gruesome dying technique showcased below.
Once they’re bought, these baby chicks are often smothered and squeezed by children, and they often die after a few days from overexposure to toxic chemicals used in the dyes, neglect, or being mishandled by the children who they have been gifted to. Oftentimes these chicks are too young to be separated from their mothers, so their death is not even a case of the added factor of mishandling, but it is determined from the day they are snatched from their nests.
Despite the fact that the former Governor of Beirut, Ziad Chebib, banned the selling of these chicks in Beirut in 2015, and the reaffirmation of this ban in accordance with a drafted Animal Welfare and Protection Law, you’ll still find people selling them on streets both inside and outside of Beirut.
If you see someone selling baby chicks this season, whether colored or uncolored, we urge you not to buy them and we ask that you help spread awareness about the barbarity of this pointless holiday trend in hopes that it will one day be completely banned in Lebanon.
