Thursday, November 26, 1998

Why do Americans celebrate by feasting on a bird they despise?

By KAREN DAVIS

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service

Like most people in post-War America, I grew up eating turkey at Thanksgiving without ever having met an actual turkey.

This changed, however, when I went to work at an animal sanctuary that had a large number of turkeys - white domestic turkeys rescued from a hatchery dump, somewhere in Pennsylvania. What impressed me most about these birds, in addition to their surprising friendliness, was the fluty pathos of their voices. It floated around the farm yard and has stayed in my mind ever since.

A few years later I adopted a turkey of my own, a white domestic turkey hen named Mila. From the start, Mila bonded with our little brown hen, Muffie. They foraged together in the woods behind our yard, and once or twice I caught them preening each other very delicately.

One of their favorite rituals took place in the evenings when I ran the hose in their water bowls. Together, they would follow the tiny rivulets along the ground, drinking as they went, Muffie darting and drinking like a brisk brown fairy, Mila dreamily swaying and sipping, piping her ineffable flute notes.

My experience with Mila has led me to reject the view that the domestic turkey is an inferior bird, unworthy of respect. There is hostility, but no truth, in the comment I read some years ago, that a turkey "is too mentally unendowed to even stand upright."

I assume the writer meant the domestic turkey, not the wild one. Yet even the wild turkey, I've discovered, is culturally rooted in ambiguity. For while the turkey is tied to the American character and sense of national identity, the bird is not a respected figure in America. The opinion of a turn-of-the-century hunter quoted in The Wild Turkey, by A.W. Schorger, is typical: Turkeys, he said, are "the wildest and the tamest, the most cunning and wary, and the most stupid and foolish of all birds."

As everyone knows, the turkey is not our official national bird; the bald eagle of North America was adopted by Congress in 1782. However, the turkey has become an American symbol, rivaling the bald eagle in actual, if not formal, significance. The bird is ceremonially linked to Thanksgiving, the oldest holiday in the United States.

Yet unlike the bald eagle, the turkey is not a symbol of prestige or power. Nor, despite frequent claims, is there any evidence that Benjamin Franklin 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 Jan. 26, 1784, two years after the bald eagle had been adopted.

While the wild turkey has a long history of involvement with Native American, Colonial American and European cultures, today the bird is mainly invoked to disparage the domestic factory-farmed turkey. Little has changed since the consumer newsletter Moneysworth proclaimed on Nov. 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 it must be taught to eat."

Yes, the domestic turkey has multiple genetic problems, of which the most visible signs are obesity and skeletal infirmities. Yet despite these man-made maladies, the bird has an amazing grace. Our turkey, Mila, slipped in and out of thorny thickets like you wouldn't believe. If physically awkward compared with her wild relatives, she definitely was not stupid.

If anything, her intelligence showed in the marvelous ways she made use of her options, trapped as she was in a troublesome body that bound her to Earth when she wanted to perch, and to a premature death.

Having known Mila (and other turkeys before and after her), I wince to encounter, year after year, the mockery of turkeys that accompanies the sentimentality around Thanksgiving. I have come seriously to question what's behind this festive enmity and the curious fact that America in the 20th-century celebrates its heritage by feasting on a bird it despises, "a humongous mutant."

This commentary may be regarded as a "turkey call" for answers. Thoughtful readers are invited to reply.

Karen Davis is the president of United Poultry Concerns Inc., a nonprofit animal advocacy organization. Readers may write to her at: P.O. Box 150, Machipongo, Va. 23405-0150, or via e-mail at: karend@capaccess.org.