By Marlena Gangi
This Thanksgiving, Dubya will honor the 65-year-old tradition of granting clemency to a turkey, where upon the fortunate fowl will be sent to the Frying Pan Park sanctuary (I am not making this up) in Virginia where it will live out the rest of its natural life. Or rather, as “natural” a life as possible as an animal that was born and then bred in a factory farm to become a Thanksgiving meal.
Factory-raised turkeys are crammed into such overcrowded conditions that their beaks are cut off to avoid injuring other birds. They are also declawed and fed antibiotics to compensate for the crowded stressful conditions, and to make the birds reach slaughter weight faster. Turkeys are bred to be so large that they develop painful leg and and joint problems and often can’t walk.
Turkeys live for months in sheds where they are packed so tightly that flapping a wing or stretching a leg is nearly impossible. They stand in waste, and urine and ammonia fumes burn their eyes and lungs. At the slaughterhouse, turkeys have their throats slit while they are still conscious. Those who miss the automated knife are scalded to death in the defeathering tank. Some farms kill turkeys by inserting an electric prod in the animal’s anus. If they survive this attempt at electrocution, they are hung upside down to be plunged into water, an act sure to get the job done.
Factory farms and the environment
Anyone who has driven by a farm has probably smelled it first from a mile away. Corporate owned factory farms that raise thousands of animals at one time produce tons of animal waste that seeps into ground water and ruins rural communities. Turkeys and other animals raised for food produce 130 times as much excrement as the entire U.S. human population — all without the benefit of waste treatment systems. No federal guidelines exist to regulate how factory farms treat, store, and dispose of the trillions of pounds of concentrated, untreated animal excrement that they produce each year.
This practice can lead to antibiotic allergies in humans and promote the development of antibiotic resistant diseases.
Most dangerous job in America
Killing animals is inherently dangerous work, but the fast line speeds, the dirty, slippery killing floors, and the lack of training make animal-processing plants some of the most dangerous places to work in America today. Workers face a real danger of losing a limb, or even their lives, in unsafe work conditions. Companies frequently deny workers’ compensation to employees injured on the job, intimidate and fire workers who try to organize, and exploit workers’ immigrant worker status in order to keep them quiet about abuses. The industry has refused to slow down the lines or buy appropriate safety gear because these changes could cut into companies’ bottom lines. In its 185-page exposé on worker exploitation by the farmed-animal industry, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” Human Rights Watch explains, “These are not occasional lapses by employers paying insufficient attention to modern human resources management policies. These are systematic human rights violations embedded in meat and poultry industry employment.” Human Rights Watch calls meat-packing “the most dangerous factory job in America.”
How “free” are free range turkeys?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the term “free range” or “free roaming” can be used to describe poultry that “has been allowed access to the outside.” Such a loose definition, without a government standard, leaves lots of room for interpretation. As long as a bird has outdoor access, it can live in a warehouse-style shed with 20,000 other birds and still be labeled “free range.”
Free-range and cage-free farms vary greatly, and while they may be an improvement over the conventional, they are by no means free of suffering. Turkeys raised for free-range meat are often subjected to the corporate farm practice of debeaking and toe trimming. Some free range farms operate so similarly to the corporate model in some cases that the origin of your turkey makes no difference.
Visiting the farms and slaughterhouses is the only way to know how the animals are being raised and killed before the meat hits your plate.
Alternatives to tradition
If you are one who is genuinely interested in straying from “traditional” Thanksgivings but are not able to visit a turkey farm of our choice, you might consider changing the way in which you have previously recognized Thanksgiving as well as rethinking assumptions based in cultural sensitivity.
Not everyone is happy to hear the greeting “Happy Thanksgiving!” as this can mean many different things to many different people.
There is a plethora of information and creative ideas for creating an alternative to tradition. One must seek this information out. If reading this article is not enough to move you to reconsider dead turkeys for your Thanksgiving table, perhaps another read will be helpful.
Marlena Gangi is a frequent contributor to The Portland Alliance.
