Karen Davis, PhD, United
Poultry Concerns (UPC)
June 2012
America celebrates its heritage paradoxically by feasting on a bird reflexively despised by mainstream culture as stupid, dirty, and silly, a misunderstanding reinforced by the turkey food industry, which alternates between caricaturing the turkey as a ludicrous "personality" versus representing the bird as an anonymous "production animal."
Perhaps more than any other animal in America, the turkey symbolizes the
ambivalence that many people have about animals. The turkey figures
simultaneously as a sacrificial victim, a figure of fun, and a sacred player
in America's mythic drama about itself as a nation.
The word turkey as an all-purpose term of derision has been traced to the
American theatre meaning a "third rate production." In James T. Farrell's
1932 novel, Young Lonigan, the character Dooley is described as "one comical
turkey, funnier than anything you'd find in real life."
The term "gobbledygook" is attributed to U.S. House Representative, Maury
Maverick, from Texas, who, as chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corp during
World War Two, issued a 1944 order banning the bureaucratic jargon he said
reminded him of his "old bearded turkey gobbler back in Texas who was always
gobbledy-gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity."
The idea of the comical turkey persists in the litany of sarcasm that
accompanies the piety of Thanksgiving each year in the United States, when
newspapers and other media poke fun at the "Thanksgiving Day bird" along
with the human "turkeys" in power, and holiday rituals include, or have
included, everything from throwing turkeys off scaffolds and out of
airplanes to forcing them to participate in turkey "Olympics" and in White
House "turkey pardoning" ceremonies.
America celebrates its heritage paradoxically by feasting on a bird
reflexively despised by mainstream culture as stupid, dirty, and silly, a
misunderstanding reinforced by the turkey food industry, which alternates
between caricaturing the turkey as a ludicrous "personality" versus
representing the bird as an anonymous "production animal." Stock photos of
thousands of debeaked turkeys crowded together awaiting slaughter in
nondescript sheds reinforce the popular idea that turkeys are worthless
except as objects of sport and meat.
Even so, the derogatory turkey stereotype is starting to modify. In the last
quarter of the twentieth century, the creation of farmed animal sanctuaries
and turkey-adoption programs offered new opportunities for people to get to
know turkeys differently from the demeaning stock versions of the bird.
Partly in response to these encounters, a growth in vegetarianism is
occurring in the United States and elsewhere. At the same time, the avian
sciences are debunking the prejudice against birds in general, and
ground-nesting birds such as turkeys and chickens in particular, as
"primitive."
Avian scientists are calling for a whole new bird-brain nomenclature based
on the now overwhelming evidence that birds share with humans a complexly
evolved brain that processes information and gives rise to experience in
much the same way as the human cerebral cortex, findings summarized by The
Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium in Nature Neuroscience Reviews in 2005.
An irony of the low esteem in which domestic turkeys have been held is that,
as wildlife biologist William Healy points out, much of what is known about
the wild turkey's intelligence is based on work with domestic turkeys. He
defends domestic turkeys from the charge of stupidity by observing that
genetic selection for "such gross breast development that few adult males
can even walk" fuels the fallacy that they are "stupid."
A further irony is that the wary turkey that dominates modern hunters'
discourse is not exactly the bird the early European explorers and colonists
encountered. As John Madson writes in the Smithsonian, "Wild turkeys, as the
first settlers found them, were as trusting and unwary as they were
plentiful."
From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, wild turkeys were
characterized repeatedly as showing the same kind of friendly curiosity
towards people that modern visitors often discover with surprise and delight
when they meet domestic turkeys at animal sanctuaries. "They often sat with
their young on my fences so trustingly that I found it difficult to bring
myself to shoot them," said one person typically of the wild turkey's
amiableness towards the settlers.
It remains to be seen whether modern experiences and the advancing sciences
of avian cognition and ethology will lead people to rethink, as did
naturalist Joe Hutto in the course of raising young turkeys to adulthood,
many of their attitudes and presumptions about "the complexity and
profoundly subtle nature of the experience within other species."
As the single most visible animal symbol in America, the de facto symbol of
the nation and "icon of American food," the turkey highlights the growing
conflict in Western culture between the age-old presumption that animals
exist solely for humans to exploit and the view that nonhuman animals are
kin to humans with value and autonomy in their own right.
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