THANKSGIVING PRAYER
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Nancy Robinson, Founder
Earth's Best Friend is Vegetarian

Thank you, God, for another year of tradition. We read somewhere that the Pilgrims and Indians killed a wild turkey 300 years ago to celebrate the Pilgrims' new home and bountiful harvest, so we've gotten the turkey killing business down to a science. In fact, Thanksgiving is our only holiday centered on a dead animal.

To bring you up to date, Lord, this year, 45 Million turkeys have been artificially bred to fatten and slaughter for the occasion. They are crammed 15,000-20,000 per building in warehouses with no windows, with automated food and air control. Just a few weeks old, these birds are debeaked with a hot iron, which also cuts their nerves and muscle tissue; and their back toes are cut off, all without anesthesia. This mutilation is to prevent their attacking each other in this man-made hell. Confined to darkness, they are forced to exist in filth, including their own feces, which gets into their food.

Those who don't make it are thrown onto a "dead pile". Others, monsterized by growth hormones, are forced with brooms, sticks, and kicking to climb steep ramps onto trucks headed for the slaughterhouse.

Those too weak for loading are left to starve to death. At 4-5 months of age, the turkeys are hung by their legs for 5-6 minutes awaiting the slaughterer's knife. Some are dropped into vats of boiling water alive as production speed misses them. Others fall onto the floor or die a slow death in puddles of blood. The contented gobbles and clucks we once knew are replaced with pitiful cries and screams.

This onslaught of your creatures also pollutes your water, soil, and air with carcasses, feces, chemicals, pesticides, and bacteria, while polluting our bodies with cholesterol, fat, and poisons. But, most of all, it poisons our spirit, as we desensitize our children to the suffering and killing of the innocent.

I guess you wonder, Lord, how we could treat these beautiful birds so obscenely when, in Nature's care, they are able to fly 55 miles an hour, to run 18 miles an hour, and to live for 15 years! Benjamin Franklin, statesman and vegetarian, was so enthralled with those robust, industrious creatures that he had hoped 150 years ago that the turkey would be chosen our national bird.

Yes, Lord, we know you gave us "every herb-bearing seed and the fruit of trees yielding seed, that they should be our food" (Genesis 1:29), but we're so addicted to the taste of flesh and blood... well, you understand, don't you, God? Besides, after we've destroyed all your handiwork you can start another Earth somewhere, can't you?

And now, Lord, before we eat our traditional corpse, we have just one traditional request: Could you do some kind of magic and bring peace to the world?

Amen

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