Thanksgiving Investigation Reveals Brutal Beginnings for Baby Turkeys

Earlier this month, Changemaker Gene Baur, President and Co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, wrote about The Truth Behind Thanksgiving. It's enough to make most people lose their appetites, and a growing number of people are embracing a vegetarian Thanksgiving.

And not to be the Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving, but a new investigation released earlier this week by the Humane Society of the United States hatches yet another reason why this holiday doesn't give turkeys much to be thankful about.

You name the animal agriculture atrocity and turkeys are subjected to it: They're selectively bred for painful deformities, debeaked and de-toed, raised in squalid warehouses where they never see the light of day, and they're exempt from the few animal protection laws that exist for farm animals.

As if that's not bad enough, the latest undercover investigation sheds light on the dark beginnings of your average baby turkey. Before they even get to the factory farm, they start out at hatcheries, like the one an undercover HSUS investigator spent 11 days at last month, just in time for Thanksgiving.

Willmar Poultry Company is the largest turkey hatchery in the U.S., responsible for 30 million poults each year. If you buy a whole turkey from a regular grocery store, there's a 50/50 chance that the bird came from Willmar. And here's a sampling of what baby turkeys are subjected to in their first days of life:

• Toes amputated and beaks cut off without any pain killers.
• Trapped in machinery or crushed to death by the weight of their flock piled onto overcrowded conveyor belts.
• Dropped on the floor, or tossed into boxes if they're sick or injured, and left for dead.
• Thrown alive in grinding machines if they're sick, deformed, injured or considered "leftovers" from buyers' orders.

As Sarah Parsons on the Sustainable Food blog points out, the cruel conditions at the hatchery are breeding grounds for consumer safety issues, too.

What the investigation reveals is not only horrifying, it's also legal. Poultry aren't included in the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, so the U.S. Department of Agriculture can turn a blind eye to how turkeys and poults at killed.

Mercy for Animals investigated a poultry slaughterhouse, where fully-conscious turkeys had their throats slit by a spinning blade. MFA writes that the exclusion of turkeys and other birds from the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and the Animal Welfare Act leads "to institutionalized and rampant abuse that would warrant felony cruelty charges if the victims were dogs or cats."

A new article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association offers more proof that turkey and chickens have some important things in common with dogs and cats — namely, the ability to feel pain and suffer. The article specifically addresses decapitation, another common practice, particularly in smaller-scale animal agriculture (where they can't afford those fancy spinning blades): "The almost inescapable conclusion ... is that decapitation is a painful procedure and that conscious awareness may persist for up to 29 seconds in the disembodied heads."

This year, I'm thankful for the felony conviction for animal aggravated cruelty that was recently handed down to the former employee of Bushway Packing, a veal slaughterhouse. But unless turkeys and other poultry start getting some legal protections, Willmar Poultry Company — and all the other hatcheries, factory farms and slaughterhouses involved in the industry — will get to keep torturing millions of turkeys each year.

Whether or not there will be turkey on your table tomorrow (even after reading this), tell the USDA to include poultry in the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act.

Photo credit: nosha