[5] in Vegetarian_Support_Group
thanksgiving
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (lmtancre@MIT.EDU)
Thu Nov 18 18:53:13 1993
From: lmtancre@MIT.EDU
To: vsg@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 93 18:45:45 EST
1) if you havent yet contacted me about the vsg thanksgiving dinner
this monday night but would like to attend, please do so soon. the details
are going only to the people who have replied.
2) BVS (boston veg society) is doing a Winter Holiday Food Prepartion
thing at Country Life this sunday nov 21st 2:30-4pm. You can call them
at 625-3790 for more info.
3) if you're looking for health reasons to avoid eating turkey this
thanksgiving, be sure to read the 4th paragraph.
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From: wheeler@super.org
To: ar-news@cygnus.com
Date: Fri, 8 Oct 93 11:59:09 EDT
Subject: The Modern Turkey
The Modern Turkey
In Need of Thanksgiving Deliverance
by Karen Davis
At a distance, turkeys look like otherwordly visitors moving
gracefully through the grass. Close up one sees their large, dark,
almond-shaped eyes and sensitive fine-boned faces.
In pre-Columbian times over 10 million wild turkeys ranged in what
are now the United States and Mexico. They thrived from forest to
plain, needing only foliage cover for nesting, trees for roosting,
food such as nuts, acorns and grass, and water. Destruction of much of
their natural habitat and heavy hunting drastically shrank their numbers
and original range.
In mating season, wild male turkeys ("toms") form territories that
the hens move freely in and out of. A typical group includes one male
and about five females. The turkey hen seeks seclusion to brood her
eggs, which hatch in the Spring not far from the mating area. The
turkey mother is alert, protective and brave. If surprised before her
young can fly she may "freeze" or sound a warning note causing her
youngsters, called "poults," to dash for cover. She may then threaten,
attack, or pretend to be hurt to distract the predator's attention to
herself away from the poults. After a few weeks the poults fly and
roost with their mother in trees. Hens and their poults flock together
apart from the male flocks, moving about their home ranges with mother
and young closely bonded until next year's mating season.
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. They're loaded with vaccines, antibiotics,
sulfonamides, mycins, and tetracyclines. In 1991, International
Hatchery Practice reported that, "[T]he last decade has thrown up
numerous examples of new diseases" in turkeys including rhinotracheitis,
paramyxovirus 2, and Salmonella enteritidis -- a major new bacterial
source of human food poisoning that can cause arthritis, blood disease,
impaired immunity, and death. The weekly agribusiness newspaper
Feedstuffs (Sept. 9, 1991) says turkeys now suffer from a "combination
of problems." For example, "[I]n recent years turkeys have been bred to
grow faster and heavier but their skeletons haven't kept pace. They
have problems standing, and fall and are trampled on or seek refuge
under feeders." Pathologically obese, commercially-bred 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.
Consumers could eat a diseased turkey or turkey part for dinner. In
November 1991, the Associated Press reported that "[R]esearchers are
looking for ways to keep afflicted birds alive long enough to get them to
market."
Turkeys are debeaked and detoed to offset the disadvantages of
over-crowding leading to downgraded carcasses. Toes are amputated
without anaesthetic. Beaks are amputated with a hot machine blade.
Research has shown that the hot blade cuts through the sensitive beak
tissue causing lifelong pain and suffering in the mutiliated,
disfigured bird resembling human phantom limb and stump pain.
Modern turkeys are so heavy and misshapen that they must be
artificially inseminated to reproduce. Obscenely, the males are
"milked" of their semen by phalus manipulating teams who stick it in the
upside down turkey hen's vagina with a hypodermic syringe or the
operator's breath pressure blown through a tube. Artificial
insemination spreads fowl cholera, a major bacterial disease of domestic
turkey.
When they're between 12 and 26 weeks, turkeys are grabbed by catchers
and carried by their legs upside down to the transport truck. Jammed in
crates they travel for hours without food, water or protection from the
weather to the slaughterhouse. There are no United States laws
regulating turkey or other poutltry transport. At the slaughterhouse,
turkeys are torn from the crates and hung by their feet from shackles
head down on a movable metal-rack -- torture for a heavy bird
especially. They may or may not be stunned, whether by a hand-held
stunner or an electrified water bath through which their heads are
dragged.
Many turkeys receive pre-stun electric shocks. Poorly stunned birds
suffer "intolerable pain," says a researcher in Turkeys (October 1990).
Stunning includes a "recovery phase." Turkeys can regain consciousness
during this period of recovered respiration and heart beat. Each year
thousands of turkeys suffer the added aganoy of badly cut necks,
bleedout, and scald tank immersion alive, conscious, and breathing.
Unlike the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, and most other modern
nations, the United States does not extend federal humane slaughter
protective legislation to turkeys or other fowl, even though birds
constitute the enormous bulk of animals killed for food each year in
this country, totalling well over six out of seven billion animals. In
1991, 285 million turkeys were killed. The National Turkey Federation
(the U.S. trade group), as expected, opposes humane slaughter protective
legislation for poultry in the United States.
Now,however, the omission of birds from humane slaughter legislation
is being challenged. In 1991, the state of California set the U.S.
precedent for legislation requiring the humane slaughter of poultry. In
1992, House Representative Andrew Jacobs (D-Indiana), introduced the
federal Humane Methods of Poultry Slaughter Act (H.R. 4124), stating,
"We decided long ago that humane slaughter ought to be a policy of a
civilized people, but chickens and other fowl were excluded. However, a
bird has a brain and feels pain just the same as other animals.
Therefore, I have introduced legislation, H.R. 4124, to make the same
requirement with regard to fowl as now exists with regard to hoofed
animals."
While no truly humane system of slaughter can be devised, the present
situation would be improved by the proposed statute as part of the
overall effort to create a more just and compassionate world. The
principle of societal obligation to animals slaughtered for food would
be legitimately extended. Jacobs, who said that he was moved by the
sight of reddened and blackened legs, breasts, and wings of dead birds
on a barbecue rack to become a vegetarian, represents this viewpoint.
This year it is to be hoped that the growing trend of alternatives to
the traditional decapitated turkey with dead wings and leg stumps for
the holiday dinner will continue. To help people make the switch,
United Poultry Concerns published a bountiful cookbook, _Instead of
Chicken, Instead of Turkey: A Poultryless "Poultry" Potpourri_. The
book is praised in Guide to Healthy Eating (now called Good Medicine),
published by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, as "full of
the heartiest heart-warming home cookin' this side of your grandmother's
stove." I think turkeys would agree.
For more information contact:
United Poultry Concerns
Karen Davis, Director
P.O. Box 59367
Potomac, MD 20859
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