Not surprisingly, the combination of human interventions, random matings, turkey escapes and vanishings, has resulted in “stock of doubtful purity,” wildness “tainted with domestic blood,” and diseases in wild turkey populations.
Anthropology has shown that, determined to do violence to an
innocent victim, societies must first turn the victim into someone
who deserves such treatment, who at some mysterious level even
“willed” being placed in an adversarial, self-destructive
relationship with the destroyer. Be they “noble” or “dumb,” animals
throughout history have been acquiescing at the altar of sacrifice
in human narratives, inviting hunters to chase and kill them,
begging people to eat them, “contracting” with people to domesticate
them and determine their fate. And they have been despised for it,
even the so-called noble ones.
As Joy Williams wrote in “The Inhumanity of the Animal People,” in
the August 1997 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Their mysterious
otherness has not saved them, nor have their beautiful songs and
coats and skins and shells, nor have their strengths, their skills,
their swiftness, the beauty of their flights.”
According to a hunter, turkeys, though inheriting wildness, retain
it only by “constant external stimulation.” By which he means
stalking, terrorizing, injuring, and killing them. Indeed, once we
start looking at the turkey, the categories of “wild” and “tame” get
fuzzy. The bird the early Europeans encountered was not the bird
that dominates modern hunters’ discourse. In anecdote after anecdote
from the 17th through the 19th centuries, the wild turkey is
characterized as showing an almost Disneyesque friendliness toward
people. As John Madson wrote in the Smithsonian, “Wild turkeys, as
the first settlers found them, were as trusting and unwary as they
were plentiful.”
A record of observations bears this out:
Wild turkeys drinking at the river were so undisturbed by a nearby hunter that he took away their broods of chicks without difficulty. They came so close to people they could be shot with a pistol. They were notoriously indifferent to disturbance at roost, which made shooting them at night very popular. They appeared to hover near our fire so we killed them. Turkeys could be so trusting that an observer might believe they were domestic.
It isn’t that these wild birds weren’t alert, savvy, and fully
capable of living successfully in their natural environment; they
just hadn’t yet learned to live under a relentless human assault.
Absent the “constant external stimulation” of human violence toward
them, wild turkeys had a tendency to revert to the trustfulness of
their ancestors. By the same token, it was not uncommon for domestic
turkeys “to revert to the wild,” according to reports that went on
to say that, allowed to wander, domestic turkeys “became so wary
that they could be recovered only by shooting them.”
The 20th-century disdain for the domestic turkey was held by a
19th-century hunter regarding the wild turkey whom he considered a
“stupid, unwary bird.” Who could respect a bird whose flocks
maintained their repose upon the sand as steamships rolled along the
Mississippi?
Who, then, are wild turkeys versus trusting
turkeys?
The wild turkeys of today are as much a rhetorical invention as they
are an aboriginal species that has been “restored.” Restoration of
turkey flocks, decimated in the 19th century by relentless killing
and destruction of their ancient lands, involved extensive
manipulation of the birds and their habitats – everything from
specialized feeding programs, crop plantings, and breeding
enclosures, to wing-clipping, artificial incubation, artificial
insemination, and culling of captive-raised birds to conform to
shifting and competing standards of “purity” and “wildness” ranging
from color to cunning. Add to these measures the use of immobilizing
drugs, airplane drops, and release of thousands of game-farm hybrid
turkeys and “surplus gobblers” prior to hunting season, and you get
an idea of the extent to which U.S. tax dollars were spent by the
government to resurrect “wild” turkeys so hunters could enjoy having
fun with a gun.
Not surprisingly, the combination of human interventions, random
matings, turkey escapes and vanishings, has resulted in “stock of
doubtful purity,” wildness “tainted with domestic blood,” and
diseases in wild turkey populations.
Despite the effort to recreate or construct a “true wild turkey”
distinct from commercialized food-industry turkeys, the so-called
wild bird keeps revisiting the human scene, walking around in
suburbia, midtown, the Bronx. “Wild turkeys have proved to be more
adaptable than we ever thought,” a biologist commented. “They often
seem unperturbed by people, especially when tempted by a feast and
not chased by dogs or guns.” – Karen Davis
This article is adapted from
More Than
a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality.
This scholarly and authoritative book examines the cultural and
literal history of turkeys. I discuss their personalities,
biological needs and concerns along with examples of hunters’
pornographic delight in luring “love-sick” turkeys to their death
with simulated mating calls.
Now available as a
free PDF from UPC.