Like Mr. Rogers, I'm a Thanksgiving Heretic

Question Thanksgiving?

Mr. Rogers is getting a lot of attention these days, and well-deserved respect for his kindness and fierce determination to embody the peace he wanted to see in the world.

I recently read this article telling the story of how Fred Rogers refused to show people eating turkey at Thanksgiving on his show because,

“I want to be a vehicle for God, to spread his message of love and peace…and I don’t want to eat anything that has a mother.”

It turns out that Mr. Rogers was a vegetarian who understood that all of God’s creatures deserved love and respect.

Here in the US, we are getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving. On the surface, it seems like a wholesome enough holiday.

For decades, I bought into the whole program: eating turkey and stuffing myself with food, and then going out to buy as much stuff as we could as cheaply as we could on Black Friday. It’s the American way! Who was I to question it?

I’m not sure when the facade started to crack. It was probably around the 9-11 attacks when everything felt upended and I didn’t resonate with the messages given by our leaders at the time (‘Go Shopping?!’)

In a way, it was easier when I just trusted the system and could go about my business. But eventually I couldn’t ignore this unsettled feeling that things were not quite right.

As I began to investigate and feel into what was true for me, I discovered some disturbing information, which has led to me, like Mr. Rogers, becoming a Thanksgiving heretic.

I offer this alternate point of view so we can have deeper and more honest conversations about what we are doing and why, and who we want to be as a nation.

For those of you who are also questioning and rejecting some of the societal norms, I offer this vulnerable sharing in solidarity. For those of you who aren’t ready to question, I offer this without judgement as I too ate turkeys for the first couple of decades of my life. I do hope that you’ll read with an open mind.

Here are the things I wish I had learned a lot earlier.

I am going to let the words of Frank Reese tell the story here (excerpted from the book ‘Eating Animals’, by Jonathan Safran Foer, which I highly recommend) because he outlines the problem far better than I could and I learned much from his words.

I Am the Last Poultry Farmer

“My name is Frank Reese and I’m the last poultry farmer. It’s what I’ve given my whole life to. I don’t know where it comes from. I went to a little one-room country school. Mother said one of the first things I wrote was a story titled, “Me and My Turkeys.”

I just always loved the beauty of them, the magesticness. I like how they strut. I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. I just love their feather patterns. I’ve always loved the personality of them. They’re so curious, so playful, so friendly and full of life.

I can sit in the house at night, and I can hear them, and I can tell if they’re in trouble or not. Having been around turkeys for almost sixty years, I know their vocabulary. I know the sound they make if it’s just two turkeys fighting or if there’s a possum in the barn. There’s the sound they make when they’re petrified, and the sound they make when they’re excited over something new.

The mother turkey is amazing to listen to. She has a tremendous vocal range when she’s speaking to her babies. And the little babies understand. She can tell them, “Run and jump and hide under me,” or “Move from here to here.” Turkeys know what’s going on and can communicate it – in their world, in their language. I’m not trying to give them human characteristics, ’cause they’re not humans, they’re turkeys. I’m only telling you what they are.

A lot of people slow down when they pass my farm. Get a lot of schools and churches and 4-H kids. I get kids asking how turkeys got in my trees or on my roof. I tell ’em, “He flew there!” And they don’t believe me! Turkeys used to be raised out on the fields like this by the millions in America. This kind of turkey is what everybody had on their farms for hundreds of years, and what everybody ate. And now mine are the only ones left, and I’m the only one doing it this way.

Not a single turkey you can buy in a supermarket could walk normally, much less jump or fly. Did you know that? They can’t even have sex. Not the anti-biotic free, or organic, or free-range, or anything. They all have the same foolish genetics, and their bodies won’t allow for it anymore. Every turkey sold in every store and served in every restaurant was the product of artificial insemination. If it were only for efficiency, that would be one thing, but those animals literally can’t reproduce naturally. Tell me what could be sustainable about that?

These guys here, cold weather, snow, ice – doesn’t hurt ’em. With the modern industrial turkey it would be a mess. They couldn’t survive. My guys could maneuver through a foot of snow without any trouble. And my turkeys all have their toenails; they all have their wings and beaks – nothing’s been cut off; nothing’s been destroyed. We don’t vaccinate, we don’t feed antibiotics. No need to.

Our birds exercise all day. And because their genes haven’t been messed with they have naturally strong immune systems. We never lose birds. If you can find a healthier flock, anywhere in the world, you take me to it and then I’ll believe you. What the industry figured out – and this was the real revolution – is that you don’t need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable. The animals have paid the price for our desire to have everything available at all time for very little money.

We never needed biosecurity before. Look at my farm. Anyone who wants to can visit, and I wouldn’t have a second thought about taking my animals to shows and fairs. I always tell people to visit an industrial turkey farm. You may not even have to go in the building. You’ll smell it before you get there.

But people don’t want to hear those things. They don’t want to hear that these big turkey factories have incinerators to burn all the turkeys that die every day. They don’t care to hear that when the industry send turkeys off to be processed, it knows and accepts that it’s gonna lose 10 to 15 percent of them in transport – the DOAs at the plant.

You know my DOA rate this Thanksgiving? Zero. But these are just numbers, not anything to get excited about. It’s all about nickels and dimes. So 15 percent of the turkeys suffocate. Throw them in the incinerator.

Why are entire flocks of industrial birds dying at once? And what about the people eating those birds? Just the other day, one of the local pediatricians was telling me he’s seeing all kinds of illnesses that he never used to see.

Not only juvenile diabetes, but inflammatory and autoimmune diseases that a lot of the docs don’t even know what to call. And girls are going through puberty much earlier, and kids are allergic to just about everything, and asthma is out of control. Everyone knows it’s our food.

We’re messing with the genes of these animals and then feeding them growth hormones and all kinds of drugs that we really don’t know enough about. And then we’re eating them. Kids today are the first generation to grow up on the stuff, and we’re making a science experiment out of them. Isn’t it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we’re doing what we’re doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?

People are so removed from food animals now. if you can’t do (farming) right, don’t do it. It’s that simple. And I’ll tell you another thing: if consumers don’t want to pay the farmers to do it right, they shouldn’t eat meat.

People care about these things. And I don’t mean rich city people. Most of the people who buy my turkeys are not rich by any means; they’re struggling on fixed incomes. But they’re willing to pay more for the sake of what they believe in. They’re willing to pay the real price. And to those who say it’s too much to pay for a turkey, I always say to them, “Don’t eat turkey.” It’s possible you can’t afford to care, but it’s certain you can’t afford not to care.

Everyone’s saying buy fresh, buy local. It’s a sham.

It’s all the same kind of bird, and the suffering is in their genes. When the mass-produced turkey of today was designed, they killed thousands of turkeys in their experiments. Should it be shorter legs or shorter keel bone? Should it be like this or like this? In nature, sometimes human babies are born with deformities. But you don’t aim to reproduce that generation after generation. But that’s what they did with turkeys.

Michael Pollan wrote about Polyface Farm in The Omnivore’s Dilemma like it was something great, but that farm is horrible. It’s a joke. Joel Salatin is doing industrial birds. Call him up and ask him. So he puts them on pasture. It makes no difference. It’s like putting a broken-down Honda on the Autobahn and calling it a Porsche. KFC chickens are almost always killed in thirty-nine days. They’re babies. That’s how rapidly they’ve grown. Salatin’s organic free-range chicken is killed in forty-two days. ‘Cause it’s still the same chicken. It can’t be allowed to live any longer because its genetics are so screwed up.

Stop and think about that: a bird that you simply can’t let live out of its adolescence. So maybe he’ll just say he’s doing as much right as he can, but it’s too expensive to raise healthy birds. Well, I’m sorry if I can’t pat him on the back and tell him what a great guy he is. These aren’t things, they’re animals, so we shouldn’t be talking about good enough. Either we do it right or we don’t do it.

I don’t allow turkey babies to be shipped through the mail. Lots of people don’t care that half their turkeys are going to die under the stress of going through the mail, or that those that do live are going to be five pounds lighter in the end than those that you give food and water to immediately. But I care. All my animals get as much pasture as they want, and I never mutilate or drug them. I don’t manipulate lighting or starve them to cycle unnaturally. I don’t allow my turkeys to be moved if it’s too cold or it’s too hot. And I have them transported in the night, so they’ll be calmer. I only allow so many turkeys on a truck, even though I could pack many, many more in.

My turkeys are always carried upright, never hung by their feet, even if that means it’ll take much longer.

It’s a person doing it, handheld. When they do it one by one, they do it well. My biggest fear is having live animals put in the boiling water. My sister worked at a large poultry plant. She needed money. Two weeks, that was all she could take. This was years and years ago, and she’s still talking about the horrors she saw there.

People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. That’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong.

They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.

My mother was part Indian. I still have that thing where the Indians apologize. In the fall, while all the other people are giving thanks, I find myself apologizing. I hate seeing them on the truck, waiting to be taken to slaughter.

They’re looking back at me saying, “Get me off here.” Killings is… it’s very… Sometimes I justify it in my mind that I can at least make it as good as possible for the animals in my custody. It’s like… they look at me and I tell them, “Please forgive me.”

I can’t help it. I personalize it. Animals are hard. Tonight I’ll go out and make everybody that jumped the fence come back in. Those turkeys are used to me, they know me, and when I go out there, they’ll come running, and I’ll open the gate and they’ll come it. But at the same time, I put thousands on trucks and sent them off to slaughter.

People focus on that last second of death. I want them to focus on the entire life of the animal.

If it was your child, do you want your child to suffer three years, thee month, three weeks, three minutes? A turkey chick isn’t a human baby, but it suffers.

I’ve never met anyone in the industry – manager, vet. worker, anyone – who doubts that they feel pain.

How much suffering will you tolerate for your food?

We are eating animals who are genetically bred to get as big as they can as fast as they can, and who are much sicker than animals in the wild would be.

We have a society where the people are bigger and sicker than they’ve ever been, This is no coincidence.

Some Current Statistics

Turkeys raised for human consumption are crowded into poorly ventilated industrial production facilities, sometimes with as many as 10,000 birds packed into a single factory building. Bred to grow alarmingly faster than their wild counterparts, turkeys suffer from numerous health complications, including heart disease and painful leg disorders.

Turkeys are bred, drugged, and genetically manipulated to grow as large as possible as quickly as possible. They often can’t support this unnatural weight so their legs break beneath them.
Male turkeys are bred to develop such large breasts that they can no longer mount females to reproduce naturally.
Most live in large windowless sheds with thousands of other birds. They won’t see sunlight until they’re taken to slaughter.
The dusty, ammonia-filled air inside these facilities is a consequence of poor ventilation and overcrowding. This highly contaminated air is associated with a host of health issues, including respiratory damage and irritated, swollen eyes.
Severe crowding causes turkeys to injure each other with sharp beaks and toes — a concern to producers because it damages the flesh — so turkeys often have portions of their beaks and toes removed at a young age- a painful process in which part of the sensitive, nerve-filled beak is removed using a hot blade, shears, or a high-voltage electrical current. Each mutilation is done without pain reliever or anesthetic of any kind.

question Thanksgiving

Once they reach market weight — on average 5-6 months, although they can live up to 10 years old in the wild— turkeys are thrust into crates and transported to slaughter. Severe injuries, such as dislocated hips and wing fractures, have been reported as a result of rough handling during crating.
Transport may involve travel over long distances, subjecting turkeys to unfamiliar noises, motion, and extreme temperatures. These stresses, coupled with the deprivation of food and water during transport, contribute to the hundreds of thousands of turkeys who die before they even reach slaughter.
Following a stressful transport, turkeys arrive at the slaughterhouse. Although the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act requires animals to be rendered insensible before shackling and slaughter, the USDA does not interpret this law to include birds killed for food, and it does not protect turkeys

Giving Thanks

As we gather together to give thanks, let us pause and look deeply at our choices. In a world that is in crisis in so many ways, it’s not enough to do things because that’s just how we’ve always done them.

It’s not good enough to accept the status quo when so many are suffering. If this story and these facts disturb you, that means your heart is open and your moral compass is working. Perhaps you will honor that inner knowing and start to make some different choices.

I’m here to support you. There is a huge wave of people waking up everyday to these disturbing truths.

Nothing tastes as good as compassion feels.

Yes, there are other disturbing aspects of Thanksgiving, not the least of which is the genocide of the native people and the subsequent white-washing of the real story, and the push towards rampant greed and over-consumption.

These topics are intimately interrelated in terms of ‘othering’ and numbing ourselves out to the suffering of other sentient beings.

How does a Thanksgiving heretic spend the holidays?

Each person has to navigate her unique situation as best as she can. I’m not going to lie and say that it is always easy.

Food can be a complicated topic, touching on a lot of potentially sensitive areas like:

familial and cultural expectations
tradition and tribe identity
conforming vs taking an independant stand

I have spent Thanksgiving days alone, but I’m introverted so this is actually not a hardship for me. Plus if I walk into a forest, I immediately have 100 new rooted friends that I can get to know, so I never feel alone!

I have disappointed family and friends by respectfully declining their invitations. I have had some people angry at me for making the choices I make. I’ve gone to dinners where people are mindlessly eating turkey and have felt on the verge of tears.

I’ve learned that to be true to myself is the highest road I can take.

For me it is the only way to stay in integrity; the only way to allow my soul to grow and flourish, to do what I came here to do and to be who I came here to be.

Doing my best to be a voice for the voiceless, whether 4-legged, winged, finned or 2-legged, is the rent I pay for the privilege of being alive on earth.

Over time I found my own tribe of people who share the same sentiments and together we celebrate Thanks-Living!

We enjoy delicious food, wonderful company and lack for nothing.