Heritage Turkeys, "Respectful" Killing, and Teaching Violence

TreeHugger published a piece titled "Heritage Turkeys and Their Journey from Farm to Table" today that refers over to a similarly named slideshow at the Atlantic. I'm impressed with neither. Both perpetuate the idea that you can "respectfully" kill someone for the purposes of pleasure and that there's some nobility in helping kids learn to kill -- and to work past their discomfort and sadness at the betrayal and death.

And apparently, it's important to read articles such as these primarily because, the TreeHugger writer argues, "anyone who consumes any kind of meat ... should be familiar with all the particulars; knowing all that helps us as consumers properly honor the animal and value the experience."

I can barely stop rolling my eyes long enough to continue.

How do you "properly honor" someone you're killing out of choice? This sort of language never stops getting under my skin. It's arrogant, illogical, and self-serving. It may make people feel better to say, "Well, I respect and honor this animal I'm killing," but the sentiment doesn't mean a damn thing to the animal who is upside down, thrashing in pain and fear as the blood gurgles out of her slit throat, or who was tormented beyond our comprehension before his body landed in a "respectful" family's oven.

If a man were going around slashing the throats of women (it's humane after all!) he considers breathtakingly beautiful, so that he could have their dead bodies for himself, for whatever purpose, would we say, "Oh, OK," once he explained that he honored each woman and "valued the experience"? Using this language to talk about killing our fellow animals is no less absurd and offensive. Both involve the brutal taking of a life not because of necessity but because of desire, because of selfish pleasure.

But this rubbish is what Slow Food wants to pass on to children -- so that there will be a new generation of people willing to do the killing for the members of the Slow Food movement. Yes, the process documented by the Atlantic started because Slow Food was concerned that not enough people were "growing" the turkeys they want to eat, so they enlisted 4-H groups, to show them the trade.

The stories from the kids are telling. For example, there is this:

Suzanne Amaral first showed a pig at a 4H event when she was two and a half years old and barely as tall as the animal itself. Now a pre-teen, she raises pigs and a steer each year. She says she gets attached, working with them every day. "I still cry when I sell them at auction," she said. "Even the mean ones." Turkeys don't cause such a problem. Here, her parents help her through the process from step one. [Photo shows girl at parents at the killing cones with turkeys.]

Two years old. She was taught to send to their death animals who trusted her and whom she loved when she was merely two years old. And even having been pushed into that process as only a toddler -- even with years of indoctrination -- she still cries every year, meaning she clearly still feels guilt over the betrayal and the killing, yet the adults in her life have taught her that this is how it has to be. And apparently, they've also taught her to look at categories of animals the way many people do -- to believe that mammals are somehow more deserving of our compassion than birds. It's all so damn sad, when we know the capacity for compassion our children have and when the development or burying of that compassion depends on how adults and society encourage it or stomp it down.

You wanna teach kids compassion and respect? Don't teach them to kill. You wanna respect a turkey this year? Don't eat one. Donate to or volunteer at a sanctuary to help one.

You may recall the video that circulated last year around Thanksgiving, of Sarah "Animals Are Made of Meat" Palin giving an interview at a turkey farm, with a turkey being killed in a cone in the background. I posted and commented on it here at that time. Around the Internet, some people seemed genuinely disturbed by the images, but many people's reactions indicated horror only at Palin's obliviousness to what was happening behind her, as if those who rely on and financially support the killing because they like the way dead animals taste are any less involved in the deaths than someone who happened to be present at the moment of death.

But apparently, our society would rather make fun of Palin than actually look at itself and what it supports -- I just realized that the video I embedded last year has been removed from YouTube, and from what I can tell, all the remaining news videos showing the interview actually blur out the turkey's body when he's flailing and thrashing. What the video showed and news organizations felt the need to censor is the so-called humane, small-scale form of slaughter, the kind the previously discussed kids are being taught, so what does it say that we think we must be shielded from viewing even that practice? It says that, deep down, we know that for all these birds, whether "factory farmed" or "heritage," death is anything but peaceful, anything but humane.

The Atlantic slideshow ends with one of the California project's organizers (and mothers) arguing, "We've raised these birds from day one, we know everything they've ever eaten, and we know that right up to their last breath they were never once mistreated."

In my world, having your throat slit and your body hacked up by people you trusted counts as mistreatment.

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Photo of Gobbles, resident of Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary, by Deb Durant of Invisible Voices