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.
----------------
Karen Davis is president of United Poultry Concerns, a non-profit
organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of
domestic fowl. She is the author of several books including More Than a
Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality, published by
Lantern Books in 2001. For more information, please visit
www.upc-online.org and
www.upc-online.org/karenbio.htm.
