Thanksgiving a Time to Reconsider Eating Turkey?

New York, N.Y. I love Thanksgiving turkey as much as the next person, but this poster form Mercy for Animals made me feel really sad. I no longer like eating pigs because I have learned they’re as smart as our beloved Shih Tzu… And we no longer cook lobster at home because we cannot stand to boil them when we understand they feel pain.

The extreme and unnatural crowding of turkeys on commercial farms is highly stressful, and causes them to be abnormally aggressive. Rather than make improvements to the birds’ environment, producers instead subject turkey poults (baby turkeys) to excruciating mutilations without anesthetic, simply cutting off “non-essential” body parts that could inflict or sustain injury. 

De-snooding involves cutting off the snood, the fleshy red protuberance that dangles over turkeys’ beaks and is used to attract mates. 

De-toeing, or toe-clipping, is a painful debilitation inflicted with shears or microwaves, and is practiced despite the fact that it is associated with lameness and higher early mortality. 

Debeaking is performed using sharp shears, a heated blade, or a high-voltage electrical current. Turkeys’ beaks are loaded with sensory receptors, much like human fingertips, and this painful procedure severs and exposes nerves. Some turkeys starve to death before they are able to eat again; others die of shock on the spot.

An article in the industry trade journal Turkey World summarizes it this way:

“Poults come in one side of the service room bright eyed and bushy tailed. They are squeezed, thrown down a slide onto a treadmill, someone picks them up and pulls the snood off their heads, clips three toes off each foot, debeaks them, puts them on another conveyor belt that delivers them to another carousel where they get a power injection, usually of an antibiotic, that whacks them in the back of their necks. Essentially, they have been through major surgery. They have been traumatized. They don’t look very good.”