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News > October 2008 > Guess
Who Shouldn't Be Coming to Dinner
 Guess
Who Shouldn't Be Coming to Dinner
by Angela Grimes, Associate Executive Director
Turkeys are beautiful, agile, and quite intelligent
animals. In nature they can fly to speeds of 50 miles per
hour for a quarter mile. They forage on the ground and climb
shrubs and trees to find nuts, seeds, and berries, as well
as insects or small invertebrates. They court and form social
groups during mating season and enjoy several different calls
and methods of communication. Benjamin Franklin exalted the
"Bird of Courage" and suggested the turkey as the
national bird of the United States.
The life of the turkey is dramatically different,
however, on factory farms. 300 million of these birds are
killed for their flesh every year. They are denied the pleasures
of flight and running, crammed into filthy and disease-ridden
dark sheds. They are never allowed to enjoy or fulfill the
basic desire of building nests and raising their young. Instead
they are subjected to the cruelties of such archaic practices
as the burning off of their beaks and toes with hot blades.
They suffer heart attacks and are crippled under their own
weight, having been genetically selected for rapid, extreme
growth and drugged to grow obese at an early age. The modern
turkey in a mass production farm grows so quickly that if
a 7-pound human baby grew at the same rate, the infant would
weigh 1,500 pounds at only 18 weeks of age! If they do not
die of thirst, starvation, or heart failure at the factory
farms, they live only long enough to be sent to slaughter,
where their throats are cut and feathers burned off —
often while they are still fully conscious.
This year, as you make your plans for Thanksgiving,
think of the hellish conditions these sensitive and intelligent
birds endure just to sate our taste for a "traditional"
dinner.
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