Quail Tales & Egg Fails

After last week's introduction to the mesorah of birds, let's dive right in to some practical halachik applications. R' Chaim Loike - Rabbinic Coordinator at OU Kosher, brought in some live birds to demonstrate for us these applications.

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R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Hello everyone and welcome back to Let's Talk Kashrus, presented by the Kashrus Awareness Project in conjunction with Torah Anytime. Today I am honored to be joined by Rabbi Chaim Loike, Rabbinic Coordinator at the OU. Thank you, Rabbi Loike, for joining us once again.

R’ Chaim Loike Thank you.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger So the last time we spoke, you gave us a little background about your experience in the field of kashrus as well as the mesorah of birds. Today I'd like to talk to you about the practical applications. What can you tell us in this area of the halachos of kashrus of birds?

R’ Chaim Loike Thank you for having me. When we accept birds as kosher, in the Ashkenaz community, it's only if there's a tradition, if there's a mesorah. And the first example I wanted to present was something that was at first very controversial. The Gemara describes a tradition can only be given over by a Rav baki b'tzayad, if a scholar who understands nature identifies the bird as kosher for his student and then the student can go and identify this bird as kosher.

Many people recently have advocated that picture books should be able to present this tradition and that you could preserve the tradition of kosher birds based on pictures. And the Rabbonim in general did not approve. Change is never a good thing. And I have an example of where that became very relevant practically.

I have here kosher quail. These are the, I'm just going to take the tape off so they look nicer. So these are the kosher quail. These are the quail that that there are four different kinds of quail according to the Gemara, but very likely these are the kind of quail that migrated that they do migrate from Africa to Europe. A strong wind comes, they'll get exhausted and collapse in the desert so they fit with the what happened in parsha in the Torah. And these quail are kosher. No question. And the OU certifies their eggs. We would certify the meat also, except there's a practical issue.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Not much meat there? Or?

R’ Chaim Loike There's not much meat, but there's a bigger practical issue which is there are a lot of feathers. And the feathering machines can't really get the feathers off well. And once you finish taking off the feathers,

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger There's not much left, right?

R’ Chaim Loike Right, and the expense is astronomical. So nobody is willing to pay for a minimal amount of meat. You you get a toothpick of meat and you're going to be paying a lot of money. But these are kosher and the quail are certified and you can find them in in a lot of restaurants as well as certain groceries will carry quail eggs with an OU on them. The quail itself we would certify but it's not le'maaseh.

And if you take a look at these quail, You'll see that these quail look very similar in their form, in their coloration. You could see the shape of the beak is the same, the shape of the foot is the same. And when you look at this alone, it would look almost identical to the kosher quail.

And you could imagine if someone had a picture of the kosher quail and they would look at these, they might think that they're actually the same bird. But if you hold them side by side, you'll see that they're very, very different. The kosher quail are much bigger. They're not able to hybridize well.

And they're completely different species, but that's not going to be apparent from a picture. It's only apparent when you see the birds live.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Interesting.Which is...Yeah, I was going to ask you, it looked like those were younger versions of what's on bottom.

R’ Chaim Loike Right, and they're full grown. And not only that, just by coincidence, these are particularly interesting because they lay among the largest eggs relative to the body size of any bird in the domestic... and I have here a bunch of different quail eggs.

This is the quail of those tiny quail. I'm sorry, this is the egg of the tiny quail and these are the eggs of the kosher quail. And you can see how similar they are in size.

So if somebody went to buy quail eggs, these are available in America. The kosher quail are obviously available. And this is the quail of, this is the egg of a bobwhite which is also available. So there are many different species that are called quail, but they're completely different species.

They don't hybridize, they don't breed together. They can't produce viable offspring. So when we want to identify the quail, you have to do it holding the actual bird. And if you want to certify the eggs, it's very important that we verify that the farm is producing the right kind of quail egg because chas v'chalilah, we wouldn't want to certify a quail egg which doesn't have a mesorah.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger So to clarify, you can't extrapolate from the fact that we could buy regular eggs in the store without a supervision, quail eggs on the other hand, for the reason that you just delineated you would definitely need reliable certification.

R’ Chaim Loike Correct.

And it's interesting that you mention that because according to the Shulchan Aruch, it's not so pashut you could just buy eggs without certification. You can only buy eggs without certification under two conditions. One, that you know what the kosher egg is supposed to look like and two, it's identified to you as that egg.

So for example, if somebody says this is a chicken egg and you've been cracking chicken eggs your whole life, so you know what a chicken egg is, in that case, you have, you do not need certification. But if you're not familiar with a quail egg, without certification, you can't be certain that the quail egg they're selling you is a kosher quail egg, even if they identified it as a kosher quail egg. I'll tell you the first time I ever spoke in Lakewood, when I first got hired by the OU, they gave me an agenda of what they wanted me to speak about. And one of the things they had on the agenda was to show people how to identify kosher chicken eggs.

I objected. I thought this was... who doesn't know how to tell if an egg is kosher? And when I finished, I went back to my office. In those days, we had those phones with the red lights.

So I I had just been hired. No one even knew I worked there. And I see the red light is blinking. Who's going to call me? And these were people who had been at my presentation and they were all saying the same thing.

I looked in my refrigerator and my eggs did not match the way you described chicken eggs. So I called the first person back, asked them where they bought it. I called the farmer and I said, what are you raising? And he said, guinea fowl. And he b'chlal wasn't selling chicken eggs.

He wasn't even saying they were chicken eggs. And guinea fowl, according to the Chasam Sofer, is a safek of being a duchifas, which is one of the 24 birds listed in the Torah as not kosher.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Wow.

R’ Chaim Loike So you could see that sometimes people don't realize that just because someone's selling an egg, you first of all, the person has to tell you what it is, and second of all, if it doesn't feel like an egg, it doesn't look like a a regular chicken egg, and these people were just taking these eggs and and it's it's a terrible thing because they were trying very hard to keep kosher obviously, but at the same time, they didn't read the Shulchan Aruch careful enough and they didn't realize that they were buying eggs of a guinea fowl.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger So where were those people buying the eggs if they were not buying them at the local grocery?

R’ Chaim Loike At a farm stand outside of Lakewood.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger I was going to ask you, we have to allay the fears of all our consumers watching this that they could still go into their regular kosher or non-kosher supermarket, buy chicken eggs off the shelf. We're talking about your particular case was where I guess these people were going like you said, they were going to a farm.

R’ Chaim Loike And and I also just to allay the fears, these eggs do not look like chicken eggs.

A guinea fowl egg feels different and it's shaped differently than a chicken egg. So the fact is is that if you go anywhere and you're buying eggs that are identified as chicken eggs and they don't look like chicken eggs, you have a problem. And if they're not even being identified as chicken eggs, then you surely have a problem.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Very interesting. What else did you want to tell us about the practical applications?

R’ Chaim Loike So the the other thing I wanted to discuss is how we identify species in practically when we're trying to identi- to discuss that. So I have here my friends from the last time. These are pigeons and this is a turtle dove. If you look at the pigeon, I don't know if we can see it, but the pigeon is a very meshuneh kind of a pigeon.

This pigeon was part of an attempt by people in England about 500 years ago to get their pigeons to look like the malachei hashareis l'havdil. And what they would do is they would breed the pigeons. They they knew the golis had happened, so they weren't going to go for six wings, but they wanted them to have four wings. And they bred them to have these, I don't know if you can see it, but on their feet.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger No, you might have to take, you might have to take it out so people can see it.

R’ Chaim Loike I'm going to try.

They don't like me so much. Okay.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger I see they're running away from you.

R’ Chaim Loike Yeah.

Come on, come on. So you could... So you could see that it has, right, feathers over here and a wings over here and it looks like wings over here. Even though they don't flap these, it looks like they have four wings.

Uh-huh. And they also have, as you could see.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Now a regular pigeon does not.

R’ Chaim Loike No. I I thought that people...

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Most of us don't have pigeons.

R’ Chaim Loike No, but people you see them outside.

I didn't bring a regular pigeon because it was a bracha levatala, I thought everybody, Brooklyn, Lakewood, their pigeons are all over the place.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Well, we don't take such a close look. But a typical pigeon has two wings. These have four.

R’ Chaim Loike Well, they look like they have four. The bottom wings don't really work. Are really just aesthetic, it's not practical. And and if you were to look at the pigeons outside, they look very different than this. And this was done by people taking abnormalities and breeding them into the pigeons and making them look bizarre.

Some people would say they still look like pigeons, some people wouldn't. But depending on the kind of bird, chickens, they can make even more bizarre. And the question is, how do you know what a species is? So this is a kind of turtle dove, this is a kind of pigeon. And generally with turtle doves and pigeons, we're a little bit more lenient because there was a tradition from Rabbeinu Yonah in the Issur v'Heter that he said that we have no species of pigeons and turtle doves which are not tahor.

So as a result, there are many people who for specifically Chasidim, when they do the mitzvah of shiluach haken, they want to consume the offspring. And one of the prime opportunities in Williamsburg is mourning doves. And mourning doves are indigenous to North America, so they can't be a mesorah from Europe. But since they look very similar to the European turtle dove, even though they don't breed together well naturally, still many people are somech on this Rabbeinu Yonah that all species of pigeons and turtle doves are kosher. And and if they look the same, we assume that they're both kosher. However, we're not sure the limits to the shitah of Rabbeinu Yonah. And I have here a very small, so he doesn't escape.

I have here a very small dove, which is called the diamond dove. And if you look at it, I'm I'm not going to release it from my hand because then I won't get it back, but you see how small it is. And even though the structure of its face, of its beak is very similar to the turtle dove, it's tiny. They can't and the question is, what is the limit to understanding this tradition of all the species of pigeons and turtle doves are all the same when you have some that are so different.

This one doesn't grow larger. And if you go to the zoo, I don't have one here, they have pigeons that are the size of turkeys, they're called Victoria Crown pigeons. And the question is do those qualify as um pigeons and turtle doves? But at least the normative is that if you have a pigeon or a or a turtle dove that looks like a pigeon or a turtle dove, so we assume that they're all qualified under the same mesorah.

R’ Yitzchok Hisiger Thank you, Rabbi Loike, for joining us once again. Thank you for bringing us all these birds so we could actually understand what you're talking about.

It's been a tremendous experience speaking to you. Thank you.

R’ Chaim Loike Thank you.