The wild turkey the early Europeans and colonists
encountered was not the bird that dominates 20th-century hunters' talk.
In anecdote after anecdote from the 17th through the 19th centuries, the
wild turkey was characterized as showing an almost Disneylike
friendliness towards people. Wild turkeys, as the first settlers found
them, walked right up to them. Sadly, the birds were likely to be met
with a bang for their bravery.
Here are some examples of early encounters between Man
and the Bird as told by the settlers. "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 hovered close to our fire so we
killed them all." "Wild turkeys would come to our house and roost in the
trees with the chickens. They often sat with their young on my fences so
trustingly that I found it difficult to bring myself to shoot them."
While these wild turkeys were alert, wary, savvy, and
fully capable of living successfully in a natural environment, they had
not yet learned to live in terror of humans. The terrified turkey was
created, not born. Indeed, the wild turkey of today is in many ways an
invention that raises questions about the notion of "wild." Restoration
of decimated turkey populations in North America has involved extensive
manipulations of both the bird and its habitat: supplemental winter
feeding including a variety of special types of feeders and shelters,
burning of forests and planting of grain crops, wing-clipping,
artificial incubation, culling of captive-raised birds to conform to
shifting standards of "purity" and "wildness," transfer of pen-raised
young and wild-captured adults from one place to another using traps,
nets, airplane drops and immobilizing drugs, and release of thousands of
game-farm hybrid turkeys prior to hunting season.
In the history of human and turkey relations, a
combination of direct human interventions, random matings, and turkey
escapes and vanishings has resulted in wildness "tainted with domestic
blood" and introduction of diseases to wild turkey populations. Today,
at the start of a new century, despite a tremendous effort to create a
"wild" turkey distinct from its domestic cousins, this noble nomad keeps
returning to the human scene, walking around in suburbia, metropolitan
Atlanta, the Bronx.
This is delightful, unless it becomes an excuse for more
hunting, as in the past it was a reason why the friendly and inquisitive
turkey became a byword for an easy target, "someone who could be easily
duped or caught," in the first place.
However, things are starting to change. Slowly but
surely, the sentiment of sentience is winning out in our society over
contempt for animals, of which the turkey has been a powerful if
ambiguous symbol in America. Because of the bird's mythic role in
American history, the turkey comes loaded with an ambivalence that is
starting to work to the bird's advantage, as well as to ours. Just as
the wild bird and the domestic bird amalgamate in the popular image and
the DNA of the Thanksgiving Turkey, so left-handedly honored, so the
turkey, which has functioned primarily as a sport and a sacrifice, is
increasingly being given a new role, being "adopted" by people and
treated as a guest at the Thanksgiving table, showing there may be
better ways of honoring kinship and exorcising our guilt -- if guilt is
involved -- than by saying, over and over, "I'm sorry." More and more
Americans are throwing taboo to the winds and speaking up for turkeys,
loving them, maybe, for who they are as much as for what they might
stand for. Increasingly, unanimous deprecation and consumption of the
turkey can no longer be counted on to pull America together at
Thanksgiving. A new consciousness of human-animal kinship is arising and
new culinary opportunities are emerging.
The news about eating animal products is not good in any
case. Because of how they are raised, turkeys and other poultry go to
slaughter infested with disease organisms including salmonella and
campylobacter bacteria. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
"Foods most likely to carry pathogens [disease microbes] are
high-protein, nonacid foods, such as meat, poultry, seafood, dairy
products, and eggs" (USDA FoodReview, May-August 1995). Significantly,
the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows turkey slaughter to be down 4
percent in 1999 over the previous year, reflecting declining consumer
purchases (USDA Agricultural Census 1999). Celebration can include
evolution. Just as western culture long ago substituted bread and wine
for animal (and human) sacrifice in traditional religious celebrations,
as in the Christian Eucharist, literally a "thanksgiving," so the tofu
turkey and thousands of other nonanimal food choices are replacing the
traditional corpse at the festive meal. If bread is not literally muscle
tissue and wine is not blood, few people are clamoring for a return to
the "good old days" of bloody altars and struggling victims.
In this same tradition of progress, the New American
Pioneers are carving out fresh places for humans and turkeys to come
together in a spirit of friendship. This, after all, is the true gift
that the turkey brought to the table in the first place. Let us rejoice
with our feathered friends.
This article appeared in newspapers
around the country in November 1999 through the Knight Ridder/Tribune
Information Service, to whom we are very grateful. Individuals,
organizations, & news media have full permission to copy & reprint and
are encouraged to do so.
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