Everybody's all freaked out and horrified by the Sarah Palin-Turkey Killing video, but Jesus, people, why? Are you all about bunch of vegans? Do you somehow forget that the bird on your Thanksgiving table has to be killed before you eat it? The method of turkey-killing depicted in that video is actually among the most humane ways of dispatching your Turkey Day bird. Sarah did you a favor.
(Cross posted at Little Green Animals)
In his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan describes a contraption for slaughtering poultry at Joel Salatin's farm, "a brace of metal cones to hold the birds upside down while they're being killed and bled out." It's a process so progressive it gives the USDA inspectors "coniptions." Here's what he says about it in his New York Times article, "An Animal's Place":
Salatin's open-air abattoir is a morally powerful idea. Someone slaughtering a chicken in a place where he can be watched is apt to do it scrupulously, with consideration for the animal as well as for the eater. This is going to sound quixotic, but maybe all we need to do to redeem industrial animal agriculture in this country is to pass a law requiring that the steel and concrete walls of . . . slaughterhouses be replaced with . . . glass. If there's any new ''right'' we need to establish, maybe it's this one: the right to look.
In fact, we have the responsibility to look, just like Sarah looks. Maybe even to try our hands at killing the birds ourselves, as I used to do as a child on my grandmother's North Dakota farm (back then, we just broke their necks as we petted them. Stealthy, dishonest to the turkey, but quick). Sarah Palin may represent five billion things we don't like, but on this, on her consumption of animal flesh, she is at least clear-eyed and non-hypocritical (I'd say that she's frighteningly non-hypocritical on a lot of things, but that's another story). She has the honesty and fortitude to see her food killed, and sometimes kill it herself. I admire her for this. I really, honestly do.
If we're going to eat meat -- and I'm not saying we shouldn't -- we should at least understand how that meat is raised and what it means in our culture. In my family, I insist on bringing the turkey, a turkey that according to my brother costs 10 times what he pays at the grocery store, because I don't want to sit before a beast that's been tortured in the way I know factory-farmed turkeys are. I want to be grateful for it, and enjoy it.
I also want it to taste like turkey.
As slow-fooder Patrick Martins writes in his excellent New York Times editorial:
Factory-farm turkeys don't even see the outdoors. Instead, as many as 10,000 turkeys that hatched at the same time are herded from brooders into a giant barn. These barns generally are windowless, but are illuminated by bright lights 24 hours a day, keeping the turkeys awake and eating.
These turkeys are destined to spend their lives not on grass but on wood shavings, laid down to absorb the overwhelming amount of waste that the flock produces. Still, the ammonia fumes rising from the floor are enough to burn the eyes, even at those operations where the top level of the shavings is occasionally scraped away during the flock's time in the barn.
Not only do these turkeys have no room to move around in the barn, they don't have any way to indulge their instinct to roost (clutching onto something with their claws when they sleep). Instead, the turkeys are forced to rest in an unnatural position -- analogous to what sleeping sitting up is for humans.
If you really want to get grossed out, forget about Sarah Palin. Watch this.
And if you haven't ordered your humanely raised turkey yet, you can still get Mary's Grateful Harvest Turkey's at Whole Foods and Bristol Farms.
You don't have to go vegan. But don't eat tortured meat.