United Poultry Concerns - [link removed]
23 November 2019

The "Thanksgiving" Turkey: Object of Sentimentality, Sarcasm, and Sacrifice
By Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns

The "Thanksgiving" turkey: object of sentimentality, sarcasm, & sacrifice was
first published Nov 23, 2019 on the Animals 24-7 website:
[link removed]


Each year a litany of sarcasm accompanies the sentimentality of Thanksgiving.
by Karen Davis, Ph.D., president, United Poultry Concerns


"Nothing so unites us as gathering with one mind to murder someone we hate,
unless it is coming together to share in a meal."
- Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner, p. 33.


The Turkey and the Eagle in American Myth

The turkey is not America's official national bird; the bald eagle of North
America was adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1782. However, the turkey has become
an American symbol, rivaling the eagle in actual, if not formal, significance.
The turkey is ceremonially linked to Thanksgiving, the oldest holiday in the
United States. Yet, unlike the eagle, the turkey is not a symbol of power and
prestige.

Nor, despite frequent claims, is there any evidence that Benjamin Franklin
(1706-1790) seriously promoted the turkey as the national bird - more
"respectable" than the bald eagle, except as a passing jest in a letter to his
married daughter, Sarah Bache, on January 26, 1784, two years after Congress had
already adopted the bald eagle (Novak).

While the wild turkey has a long history of involvement with Native American,
Colonial American, and European cultures, today the bird is invoked primarily in
order to disparage commercially raised factory-farm turkeys. Little has changed
since the consumer newsletter Moneysworth snarked on November 26, 1973:

"When Audubon painted it, it was a sleek, beautiful, though odd-headed bird,
capable of flying 65 miles per hour. . . . Today, the turkey is an obese,
immobile thing, hardly able to stand, much less fly. As for respectability, the
big bird is so stupid that it must be taught to eat."1

Each year, this litany of sarcasm accompanies the sentimentality around
Thanksgiving. Each year, the media ridicule the Thanksgiving Day bird. If
yesterday it was certain ethnic populations and foreigners we insulted - a
bigotry resurgent in the 21st century - today we can count on the likelihood
that, as usual at Thanksgiving, turkeys will be exposed to humiliation and
insult.


Strange Mixture of Honor and Hatred

Thanksgiving has other functions, but one thing it does is to formalize a desire
to kill someone we hate and make a meal out of that someone. In this role, the
turkey dinner is not far distant from a cannibal feast, in what Eli Sagan called
that "strange mixture of honor and hatred" in which not a few cultures in
history have disposed of their enemies and relatives in ceremonial fashion.

Many people to whom I mention this "hatred of the turkey" idea say they never
noticed it before, or if they did, they gave it no thought. Such obliviousness
illustrates, in part, the idea that the "most successful examples of
manipulation are those which exploit practices which clearly meet a felt - not
necessarily a clearly understood - need among particular bodies of people,"
according to Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger on page 307 of The Invention of
Tradition.

In the case of Thanksgiving, the need is not so much to eat a turkey, a
patriotic obligation that many people reject, but to rationalize an activity
that, despite every effort to make the turkey seem more like a turnip, has
purposely failed to obliterate the bird into just meat. To do so would diminish
the bird's dual role in creating the full Thanksgiving experience.


"Performance of Killing" Must Be "Seen" to Be Real

To affect people properly, a sacrificial animal must not only be eaten by them;
the animal's death must be "witnessed by them, and not suffered out of sight as
we now arrange matters." But since this is how we now arrange matters - the
modern Do It Yourself slaughter fetish notwithstanding- attention must somehow
be "deliberately drawn, by means of ritual and ceremony" to the reality of the
animal's life and the "performance of killing," observes Margaret Visser in her
survey of eating customs from prehistory to the present, The Rituals of Dinner
(32).

This is why, to be ritually meaningful, the turkey continues to be culturally
constructed as a sacred player in our drama about ourselves as a nation, at the
same time that we insist that the bird is a nobody, an anonymous "production
animal." For Visser, what is meant by "sacrifice" is literally the "making
sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. No wonder that mentioning cannibalism
in connection with eating turkeys or any other animals provokes a storm of
protest, since as she says, cannibalism to the Western mind is "massively
taboo," more damnable than incest (5).


Cannibalism

However, cannibalism, transposed to the consumption of a nonhuman animal, is a
critical, if largely unconscious, component of America's Thanksgiving ritual.2

America knows at some level that it has to manage its portion of humanity's
primeval desire to have "somebody" suffer and die ritualistically for the
benefit of the community or the nation at a time when the consumption of
nonhuman animals has become morally problematic in the West as well as
industrialized to the point where the eaters can barely imagine the animals
involved in their meal. It is ironic, Visser says on page 32, that "people who
calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most
death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen," are shocked by the
slaughtering of animals in other cultures.



Notes
1. In nature, baby turkeys are taught how to forage for food by their mothers.
Deprived of the maternal care and teachings they evolved to experience in the
company of their mothers for their first 5 months of life, newborn turkeys
suffer unimaginably on factory farms. Not only are they bereft of their mothers;
they are declawed and their beaks are painfully mutilated with blades or lasers
as soon as they hatch in the mechanical incubators from which they proceed to a
life of merciless, bewildering misery for three to five months, until those who
survive the ordeal are murdered in a slaughterhouse. A turkey researcher summed
up the newborn turkeys' experience in the first hours of hatching: "Essentially,
they have been through major surgery. They have been traumatized" (Donaldson).
These "major surgeries" are inflicted on the turkeys without anesthesia or
post-surgical pain killers.

2. Margaret Visser writes on page 33 of The Rituals of Dinner that myths about
sacrifice "often tell us that the animal killed and eaten takes the place of the
original sacrificial offering, a human being. . . . Animals, according to this
apprehension, are surrogates, substitutes for members of our own species whom we
once joined in killing." Visser notes also the traditional "eliciting of signs
that the animal does not mind dying to feed us." On the one hand we relish the
exertion of absolute power over an animal who does not want to die. On the other
hand we like the idea that an animal desires to suffer and die for the sake of
the "superior" species.



References
Karen Davis. More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality.
New York: Lantern Books, 2001.

William E. Donaldson, et al. "Early Poult Mortality: The Role of Stressors and
Diet." Turkey World (January-February), 27-29. See p. 138 of Karen Davis's More
Than a Meal.

Eric Hobsbawn, and Terrence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983.

"The Light and Dark Sides of Thanksgiving Turkey." Moneysworth: The Consumer
Newsletter 4.4 (November 26, 1973), 1-2.

Matt Novak. "Did Ben Franklin Want the Turkey to Be Our National Symbol?"
GIZMODO, November 20, 2014.
[link removed]

Eli Sagan. Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form. New York: The
Psychohistory Press, 1974.

Margaret Visser. The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities,
and Meaning of Table Manners. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.

_______________________

KAREN DAVIS, PhD is the President and Founder of United Poultry Concerns, a
nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment
of domestic fowl including a sanctuary for chickens in Virginia. Inducted into
the National Animal Rights Hall of Fame for Outstanding Contributions to Animal
Liberation, Karen is the author of numerous books, essays, articles and
campaigns. Her latest book is For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation:
Essays on Chickens, Turkeys, and Other Domesticated Fowl (Lantern Books, 2019).
To order Karen's books, visit UPC Books.

--
United Poultry Concerns is a nonprofit organization that promotes
the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl.
Don't just switch from beef to chicken. Go Vegan.
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