Over 100 million turkeys suffer a birth to death life in the U.S.A only, for just one-day's celebration.

What is religious, sacred, heavenly, or celestial about the murder of a defenseless, fully sentient bird? Thanksgiving is a holocaust for turkeys. To which god do we sacrifice these birds each year? Perhaps to the god of agriculture and finance…

In the wild, turkeys display complex social interactions with one another. Foraging over a range that can cover up to 11 square miles, they fulfill their dietary requirements mainly with nuts, acorns and grass. By contrast, turkeys are raised on factory farms experience little semblance of a natural life. They spend their lives cooped up in barns, and they are given concentrated feed laden with antibiotics to prevent disease and to boost growth. Turkeys are deprived of their most basic physical and behavioral needs. Such as dust bathe to keep clean, maintain good plumage, and eliminate parasites.

Wild Turkeys have many methods of communicating with one another, using both vocal and visual methods. They also have amazing eyesight. They can fly 55 mph, run 18 mph, and live up to 15 years. However, there is no such thing today as a "pure wild turkey". Turkeys today reflect humans’ multiple violations, manipulations, and severe domination.

Turkeys are sensitive and intelligent creatures. However, the industrial production system, into which these magnificent birds are trapped, is anything but sensitive. Each year, millions of turkeys are subjected to painful mutilations, suffer from crippling leg and hip problems, and spend the entirety of their lives in toxic fumes with thousands of their brethren.
This is the face of modern turkey production, a sea of white in barren and crowded conditions.

Like their wild relatives, domestic turkeys are unsuited to the harsh turkey confinement systems in which 15,000 or more birds with three square feet of floor space each are forced to sit and stand in filthy litter, breathing burning ammonia fumes and lung-destroying dust. They develop respiratory diseases, ulcerated feet, blistered breasts, and ammonia-burned eyes.

Turkey mothers are among the most protective mothers in the world, but the new born turkeys are born in a concrete hatchery. At the hatchery, poults (newborn and young turkeys) are squeezed, thrown 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 conveyer 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. Only a few hours old.

During the first two weeks of life, these baby birds are extremely vulnerable to diseases and death. Mortality is highest at this point. Without their mothers for guidance, a number of these poults fail to learn to reach their food or water, which sentences the unfortunate creatures to starvation and death. Million die at their first week of life.

Around six weeks of age, the turkeys are moved to growing houses, which typically have a capacity of about 50,000 birds. Every available space of these barns is crammed with turkeys, a high volume production that allows factory farmers to dismiss the loss or lower production of individual birds due to stress and disease. The conditions in these buildings are dim and crowded, and lead to damaging behaviors, such as feather pecking and cannibalism.

Turkeys must stand mired in layers of waste while urine and ammonia fumes burn their eyes and lungs. They get diseases like turkey Rhinotracheitis (TRT), which makes them cough and sneeze, they get swollen faces, and they get sinusitis. They are given drugs to make them fit for slaughter. With the indifferent care they receive (if any), turkeys still die and their bodies left to rot on the filthy floor. Due to the extreme boredom, in order to take to take out their desperation on something, birds will peck at the rotting corpses.
Imagine 300,000 turkeys using just 1 room as a toilet, living in that filth for a lifetime.

Modern "production" turkeys are doubly imprisoned: in filthy pathogen-infested buildings from which they cannot escape and in alien bodies that frustrate their natural impulses.

If a 7-pound human baby grew at the same rate that today's turkey grows, when the baby reaches 18 weeks of age, she/he would weigh 1,500 pounds!

The genetic engineering and inbreeding of domestic turkeys, due to a great demand for more and more "white" meat, has resulted in an adult male bird so large that he can weigh up to 80 pounds, four times the weight of his wild counterpart. This increase in size and the weight of his massive pectoralis muscle, the so-called "turkey breast," often results in a bird too heavy to stand on his own two feet -- his legs are too weak to support him.

Forced by drugs, like zinc bacitracin, to grow to huge unnatural sizes for the 'market' (consumers) at an unnatural speed, their bones cannot keep pace and so their legs may be too fragile to bear the weight; their hips may become displaced. Therefore, they will, not be able to reach food or drink and will starve to death, if disease does not get them first.

Turkeys develop congestive heart and lung disease accompanied by engorged coronary vessels, distended fluid-filled pericardial sac, abdominal fluid, and a gelatin-covered enlarged congested liver. Their hearts explode. Hundreds of thousands of turkeys suffer from “round heart syndrome” because of the stress of confinement and genetic selection. Other common diseases affecting intensively reared turkeys include Colisepticaemia, blackhead (which damages the liver), turkey Rhinotracheitis (TRT), and Pasteurella infection, which causes a commonly fatal respiratory disease. Turkeys are also often infected with Salmonella.

In addition to be altered to grow fast and large, commercial turkeys have been anatomically manipulated to have large breasts to meet consumers’ demand for breast meat. As a result, turkeys cannot mount and reproduce naturally, and so their sole means of reproduction is artificial insemination.

The breeding stocks are kept in single sex pens. Males are kept in flocks of 30-50 birds at a stocking density of 1m² per bird. Hens are kept in larger flocks at a density of 345cm per kg of bird. It completely frustrates the natural mating instincts of turkeys and is distressing for both males and hens. Turkeys used for breeding are detoed (their toes are cut of) and beak-trimmed, and the male turkeys’ snoods are cut off (desnooded). All these “elective surgeries” involve chronic pain. No anaesthetic is ever given to the poor birds.

Obscenely, the males are "milked" of their semen by phallus manipulating teams who stick it in the upside down turkey hen's vagina with a hypodermic syringe or the operator's breathe pressure blown through a tube. Artificial insemination spreads fowl cholera, a major bacterial disease of domestic turkey. It is not artificial insemination it is rape!

As a result of their large size, lameness is a considerable problem in male breeding turkeys. Lameness often involves disease of the hip joints, called Antitrochanteric Degeneration. Studies have shown over 90% of male breeding turkeys suffering degenerative hip disease at slaughter and it is a major cause of mortality. The mature stag weighs around the same as 8-9 year-old child, yet is hung up side down in shackles for up to six minutes, before being electrically stunned and murdered.

The modern bird's swollen body, distorted physical shape, and inability to mate naturally, remind us not only of the cruel arbitrariness of fate, but of the sinister power of humanity.

Highly domesticated turkeys, far more than their wild ancestors, are sensitive birds, easily frightened. Entire flocks of turkeys have been known to die of shock at a clap of thunder. When the time comes for them to be sent to slaughter at 12-26 weeks, they suffer terribly. "Catchers" go into the shed and grab the terrified birds by the legs and roughly stuffed them into crates where wings and legs get trapped, so yet more broken bones; they are then transported to the slaughterhouse.

Jammed in crates they travel for hours without food, water or protection from the weather. Millions of turkeys die every year as a result of heat exhaustion, freezing, or accidents during transport to slaughter. This journey will be turkey's first view of the outside world, and also the last one.

Turkeys are unloaded from the transport crates and hung upside down from shackles. This is frequently a stressful and painful process, with rough handling being commonplace as the birds are removed from the crates and placed in the shackles. The practice of suspending turkeys, which are heavy birds, upside down by their legs from shackles, places very considerable strain on the birds' legs and hips. Modern turkeys are selectively bred to develop huge meaty breasts. The heavy upper body places excessive stress on the hips and results in many turkeys suffering from degenerative hip disorders. Such birds experience great pain both when the rigid steel shackles compress the soft tissue of the shank against the bird's bone. And then, as they are left to hang upside down, sometimes for several minutes.

Turkeys are knowingly tortured with agonizing paralytic electric shocks prior to partial neck-cutting in the slaughterhouses. Furthermore, Around 50% of turkeys experience painful, pre-stun electric shocks either because their wings enter the waterbath stunner before their heads, or because the entrance ramp to the stunner is electrically live due to water splashing out of the stunner. The whole purpose of stunning is to render birds immediately unconscious and thus insensible to pain. This purpose is totally negated if, as often happens, turkeys receive painful electric shocks before being made unconscious. "Somehow" the animals always lose. Even the machine that suppose to reduce their suffer, ends up increasing it.

After passing through the stunning tank, the birds' throats are slashed, usually by a mechanical blade, and blood begins rushing out of their bodies. Inevitably, the blade misses some birds who then proceed to the next station on the assembly line, the scalding tank. Here they are submerged in boiling hot water. Birds missed by the killing blade are boiled alive! This occurs so commonly, affecting millions of birds every year, that the industry has a term for these birds. They are called "redskins".

In an average lifetime, just one American devours 65 turkeys. Every piece of flesh consumed was riddled with agony!

Only One Solution
Updated in Sep 2003
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