The Dark Side of Turkey Day — Surge | Creative Non-Profit for Animal Rights

There’s no better example of giving thanks than causing suffering to someone else, right?

Think about it. We gather around with our families and close ones, talk about gratitude whilst someone is dead on the table in front of us. And not only that, but the individual who is now dead lived a life of suffering and had their throat slashed.

Of course we are talking about the turkey whose body we carve on a plate. And to add further insult to injury, Thanksgiving is sometimes even called “Turkey Day”, when really a more apt name would be Turkey Massacre Day, because that is essentially what thanksgiving is. A day of mass slaughter for turkeys.

In fact, every single year around 245 million turkeys are killed in the US, with 46 million of those being killed just for Thanksgiving. It’s not just the killing that is bad, although we’ll get to that too, but the way these animals are raised is also horrifying.

Firstly, turkeys have been selectively bred to grow abnormally large, in fact farmed turkeys are now nearly double the weight that they were in the 1960s and they reach that weight in half the time. Because of this, the turkeys are unable to naturally reproduce and so all turkey breeding is done artificially by hand.

Forced semen extraction and insemination

Male turkeys are shackled or clamped down. The worker will then stimulate by hand the genitals of the turkey until the turkey ejaculates, at which point the semen is collected through a suction hose, that is often operated by the worker sucking through the pipe themselves to collect the semen.

The workers will then clamp the females in the same way, before again stimulating them by using their hands and injecting the semen inside the female turkey. Both the male and female breeding turkeys spend their entire lives in cramped, dark barns before being killed and used for lower-grade processed meat products.

The eggs that are laid are then taken to hatcheries where the baby turkeys are hatched and placed on a conveyor belt. Workers will then mutilate the babies by cutting off the ends of their back toes and debeaking them, either by using heated blades, infrared lasers or scissors.

Any birds who are sick, injured, deformed or dying are either thrown into bins and left to die slowly, wrapped in plastic bags and suffocated to death or thrown into grinders and ground up alive. The turkeys who have been mutilated are then transported to the farms, where they will spend the rest of their lives.

“Thanksgiving dinner’s sad and thankless
Christmas dinner’s dark and blue
When you stop and try to see it
From the turkey’s point of view
Sunday dinner isn’t sunny
Easter feasts are just bad luck
When you see it from the viewpoint
Of a chicken or a duck
Oh how I once loved tuna salad
Pork and lobsters, lamb chops too
’TIl I stopped and looked at dinner
From the dinner’s point of view”

— Poem by Shel Silverstein

On these farms thousands, even tens of thousands of turkeys are housed tightly together, with only around 3 square feet of space each. Many turkeys will die whilst trapped inside these farms, often because of organ failure due to how abnormally fast they grow or stress induced conditions that cause the birds to stop eating.

The turkeys will spend around five months on these farms, before teams of catchers work their way through the barns, picking the turkeys up, often breaking their legs and wings, and forcing them into cages that are loaded onto trucks, which will then drive to the slaughterhouse.

Once at the slaughterhouse, the turkeys are shackled by their legs and hung upside down on a conveyor belt, where they are first dragged through an electrified water bath that is meant to immobilise them. Many of the turkeys are not adequately stunned, or don’t make contact with the electrified water bath, meaning that they are conscious when their throats are slit.

If the blade fails to cut the bird’s throat properly they will then be scalded alive in the scalding tank that’s used to remove their feathers. The birds will then be butchered, processed and packaged ready for us to buy them, stuff their insides and carve them up declaring how grateful we are to be able to give thanks.

And all of this suffering for what, a tradition? But we don’t think that something is moral or acceptable simply because it is traditional. If that was true then the Yulin dog meat festival, the slaughter of pilot whales in the Faroe Islands and the slaughter of dolphins in Japan would be moral, and yet we don’t believe that they are.

In fact, we condemn these traditional events and we sign petitions to stop them. And yet every year hundreds of millions of turkeys endure a horrific life and violent death, all of which is completely needless and is done simply because of a tradition.

And, if that wasn’t enough, every year the President will ceremonially pardon two turkeys, a completely farcical display that does nothing to actually protect the turkeys, as due to the fact they have been selectively bred to grow so large, so fast, they die, normally within just a matter of months of being pardoned.

Turkeys are intelligent and complex animals, who create long lasting bonds with each other and have unique voices so they can tell each other apart. They are affectionate and will even cuddle people, much in the same way as a dog or a cat.

So perhaps this holiday season we should think about those who suffer for our celebrations, and look beyond our traditions.