When the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians supposedly gathered together in Plymouth Colony in 1621, it was to give thanks for a bountiful harvest. The abuse that Americans now inflict on turkeys_who many historians suspect weren't even served at the inaugural feast _ isn't in keeping with the spirit established at that first Thanksgiving. It's time we started a new tradition, a compassionate one that involves a tasty vegan feast _ not a dead centerpiece.
Turkeys are smart, social birds who enjoy gobbling along to music and having their feathers stroked. When they aren't being forced to live on filthy factory farms, they spend their days exploring, roosting in trees and raising their families. Those who have spent time around turkey hens say that they're devoted mothers who take meticulous care of their young. Broods stay together for up to five months, and male siblings maintain a lifelong bond.
Turkeys like to eat together as a family and enjoy human companionship. Males especially like attention _ the rescued ones at Woodstock Farm Sanctuary in New York follow their caretakers around, puffing up their plumage and waiting quietly and patiently to be noticed.
Retired poultry scientist Tom Savage says, "I've always viewed turkeys as smart animals with personality and character, and keen awareness of their surroundings." And yet each year, more than 228 million of them are raised and killed for food, and nearly 90 million are slaughtered and eaten just during the holidays alone.
Before these gentle birds end up on American dinner plates, they spend five to six months packed together so tightly inside dark sheds that flapping a wing or stretching a leg is nearly impossible. They have no choice but to stand in their own waste, breathing in strong ammonia fumes, which burn their eyes and lungs.
To keep them from pecking and clawing one another to death out of frustration, farmers cut off portions of their sensitive upper beaks and toes. The fleshy appendage that hangs beneath male turkeys' beaks, called the snood, is also chopped off. All these procedures are performed without painkillers, even though they're known to cause both acute and chronic pain.
Farmers genetically manipulate turkeys and dose them with antibiotics in order to keep them alive in these deplorable, disease-ridden conditions _ as well as to stimulate unnatural growth. Because they're drugged and bred to grow so large in such a short period of time, they can't even support their own weight and their legs often break. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, turkeys today weigh, on average, a whopping 57 percent more than their counterparts did back in 1965. Turkeys raised for food are now so large that they can barely walk, let alone mate with each other, so they're all bred through artificial insemination.
At the end of their short, painful lives, they're shackled and hung upside down. Their heads are dragged through an electrified "stun bath," which immobilizes but doesn't kill them. Many of them dodge the tank in terror and are still conscious when their throats are cut. And if the killing blade and the backup killer fail to cut their throats properly _ which happens frequently _ they end up scalded to death in the feather-removal tanks.
Does this savagery embody the holiday spirit to you?
Thanksgiving is a time for celebration, not cruelty. If you don't want to support such suffering, stuff yourself with tasty vegan foods _ not a turkey's corpse.
