United Poultry Concerns <news@upc-online.org>: Nov 27 10:45AM -0800
United Poultry Concerns <https://www.UPC-online.org>
27 November 2022
The “Thanksgiving” Turkey: Object of Sentimentality, Sarcasm, and Sacrifice
The “Thanksgiving” Turkey: Object of Sentimentality, Sarcasm, & Sacrifice
was first published Nov 23, 2019 on the *Animals 24-7* website. It was
republished this year on the *Animals 24-7* site
<https://www.animals24-7.org/2019/11/23/the-thanksgiving-turkey-object-of-sentimentality-sarcasm-sacrifice/>
November 23, 2022 with additional commentary.
In case anyone has not seen the PETA investigative report on a “humane”
turkey farm in Pennsylvania, please read this article
<https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/with-thanksgiving-on-the-horizon-pennsylvania-turkey-producer-charged-with-animal-cruelty/>.
Please understand that turkeys and other farmed animals will NEVER be
treated humanely and that the companies that own them will ALWAYS lie. Such
businesses bring out the worst in human nature, as this investigation, like
countless other investigations of animal farms and slaughterhouses, shows.
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The “Thanksgiving” Turkey: Object of Sentimentality, Sarcasm, and Sacrifice
*By Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns*
*Each year a litany of sarcasm accompanies the sentimentality of
Thanksgiving.*
*”Nothing so unites us as gathering with one mind to murder someone we
hate, unless it is coming together to share in a meal.” *
– Margaret Visser, *The Rituals of Dinner,* p. 33.
*The Turkey and the Eagle in American Myth*The turkey is not America’s
official national bird; the bald eagle of North America was adopted by the
U.S. Congress in 1782. However, the turkey has become an American symbol,
rivaling the eagle in actual, if not formal, significance. The turkey is
ceremonially linked to Thanksgiving, the oldest holiday in the United
States. Yet, unlike the eagle, the turkey is not a symbol of power and
prestige.
Nor, despite frequent claims, is there any evidence that Benjamin Franklin
(1706-1790) seriously promoted the turkey as the national bird – more
“respectable” than the bald eagle, except as a passing jest in a letter to
his married daughter, Sarah Bache, on January 26, 1784, two years after
Congress had already adopted the bald eagle (Novak).
While the wild turkey has a long history of involvement with Native
American, Colonial American, and European cultures, today the bird is
invoked primarily in order to disparage commercially raised factory-farm
turkeys. Little has changed since the consumer newsletter *Moneysworth*
snarked on November 26, 1973:
“When Audubon painted it, it was a sleek, beautiful, though odd-headed
bird, capable of flying 65 miles per hour. . . . Today, the turkey is an
obese, immobile thing, hardly able to stand, much less fly. As for
respectability, the big bird is so stupid that it must be taught to eat.”1
Each year, this litany of sarcasm accompanies the sentimentality around
Thanksgiving. Each year, the media ridicule the Thanksgiving Day bird. If
yesterday it was certain ethnic populations and foreigners we insulted – a
bigotry resurgent in the 21st century – today we can count on the
likelihood that, as usual at Thanksgiving, turkeys will be exposed to
humiliation and insult.
*Strange Mixture of Honor and Hatred*Thanksgiving has other functions, but
one thing it does is to formalize a desire to kill someone we hate and make
a meal out of that someone. In this role, the turkey dinner is not far
distant from a cannibal feast, in what Eli Sagan called that “strange
mixture of honor and hatred” in which not a few cultures in history have
disposed of their enemies and relatives in ceremonial fashion.
Many people to whom I mention this “hatred of the turkey” idea say they
never noticed it before, or if they did, they gave it no thought. Such
obliviousness illustrates, in part, the idea that the “most successful
examples of manipulation are those which exploit practices which clearly
meet a felt – not necessarily a clearly understood – need among particular
bodies of people,” according to Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger on page
307 of *The Invention of Tradition*.
In the case of Thanksgiving, the need is not so much to eat a turkey, a
patriotic obligation that many people reject, but to rationalize an
activity that, despite every effort to make the turkey seem more like a
turnip, has purposely failed to obliterate the bird into just meat. To do
so would diminish the bird’s dual role in creating the full Thanksgiving
experience.
*”Performance of Killing” Must Be “Seen” to Be Real*To affect people
properly, a sacrificial animal must not only be eaten by them; the animal’s
death must be “witnessed by them, and not suffered out of sight as we now
arrange matters.” But since this is how we now arrange matters – the modern
Do It Yourself slaughter fetish notwithstanding – attention must somehow be
“deliberately drawn, by means of ritual and ceremony” to the reality of the
animal’s life and the “performance of killing,” observes Margaret Visser in
her survey of eating customs from prehistory to the present, *The Rituals
of Dinner *(32).
This is why, to be ritually meaningful, the turkey continues to be
culturally constructed as a sacred player in our drama about ourselves as a
nation, at the same time that we insist that the bird is a nobody, an
anonymous “production animal.” For Visser, what is meant by “sacrifice” is
literally the “making sacred” of an animal consumed for dinner. No wonder
that mentioning cannibalism in connection with eating turkeys or any other
animals provokes a storm of protest, since as she says, cannibalism to the
Western mind is “massively taboo,” more damnable than incest (5).
*Cannibalism*
However, cannibalism, transposed to the consumption of a nonhuman animal,
is a critical, if largely unconscious, component of America’s Thanksgiving
ritual.2
America knows at some level that it has to manage its portion of humanity’s
primeval desire to have “somebody” suffer and die ritualistically for the
benefit of the community or the nation at a time when the consumption of
nonhuman animals has become morally problematic in the West as well as
industrialized to the point where the eaters can barely imagine the animals
involved in their meal. It is ironic, Visser says on page 32, that “people
who calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most
death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen,” are shocked by the
slaughtering of animals in other cultures.
*Notes*
1. In nature, baby turkeys are taught how to forage for food by their
mothers. Deprived of the maternal care and teachings they evolved to
experience in the company of their mothers for their first 5 months of
life, newborn turkeys suffer unimaginably on factory farms. Not only are
they bereft of their mothers; they are declawed and their beaks are
painfully mutilated with blades or lasers as soon as they hatch in the
mechanical incubators from which they proceed to a life of merciless,
bewildering misery for three to five months, until those who survive the
ordeal are murdered in a slaughterhouse. A turkey researcher summed up the
newborn turkeys’ experience in the first hours of hatching: “Essentially,
they have been through major surgery. They have been traumatized”
(Donaldson). These “major surgeries” are inflicted on the turkeys without
anesthesia or post-surgical pain killers.
2. Margaret Visser writes on page 33 of *The Rituals of Dinner* that myths
about sacrifice “often tell us that the animal killed and eaten takes the
place of the original sacrificial offering, a human being. . . . Animals,
according to this apprehension, are surrogates, substitutes for members of
our own species whom we once joined in killing.” Visser notes also the
traditional “eliciting of signs that the animal does not mind dying to feed
us.” On the one hand we relish the exertion of absolute power over an
animal who does not want to die. On the other hand we like the idea that an
animal desires to suffer and die for the sake of the “superior” species.
*References*
Karen Davis. *More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and
Reality*. New York: Lantern Books, 2001.
William E. Donaldson, et al. “Early Poult Mortality: The Role of Stressors
and Diet.” *Turkey World* (January-February), 27-29. See p. 138 of Karen
Davis’s *More Than a Meal*.
Eric Hobsbawn, and Terrence Ranger, eds. *The Invention of Tradition*.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
“The Light and Dark Sides of Thanksgiving Turkey.” *Moneysworth: The
Consumer Newsletter* 4.4 (November 26, 1973), 1-2.
Matt Novak. “Did Ben Franklin Want the Turkey to Be Our National Symbol?
<https://gizmodo.com/did-ben-franklin-want-the-turkey-to-be-our-national-sym-1661300334>”
*GIZMODO*, November 20, 2014.
Eli Sagan. *Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form*. New York: The
Psychohistory Press, 1974.
Margaret Visser. *The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution,
Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners*. New York: Penguin Books,
1992.
KAREN DAVIS, PhD <https://www.upc-online.org/karenbio.htm> is the President
and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that
promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl
including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into the National
Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal
Liberation, Karen is the author of numerous books, essays, articles and
campaigns. Her latest book is For the Birds: From Exploitation to
Liberation: Essays on Chickens, Turkeys, and Other Domesticated Fowl
(Lantern Books, 2019). To order Karen’s books, visit UPC Books
<https://www.upc-online.org/merchandise/book.html>.
—
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
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