Than a Meal: the Turkey in History, Myth

More Than a Meal Abigail at United Poultry Concerns’ Thanksgiving Party Saturday, November 22, 1997. Photo: Barbara Davidson, The Washington Times, 11/27/97 More Than a Meal The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality Karen Davis, Ph.D. Lantern Books New York A Division of Booklight Inc. Lantern Books One Union Square West, Suite 201 New York, NY 10003 Copyright © Karen Davis, Ph.D. 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Lantern Books. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data For Boris, who “almost got to be The real turkey inside of me.” From Boris, by Terry Kleeman and Marie Gleason Anne Shirley, 16-year-old star of “Anne of Green Gables” (RKO-Radio) on Thanksgiving Day, 1934 Photo: Underwood & Underwood, © 1988 Underwood Photo Archives, Ltd., San Francisco Table of Contents 1 Acknowledgments . .9 Introduction: Milton, Doris, and Some “Turkeys” in Recent American History . .11 1. A History of Image Problems: The Turkey as a Mock Figure of Speech and Symbol of Failure . .17 2. The Turkey By Many Other Names: Confusing Nomenclature and Species Identification Surrounding the Native American Bird . .25 3. A True Original Native of America . .33 4. Our Token of Festive Joy . .51 5. Why Do We Hate This Celebrated Bird? . .73 6. Rituals of Spectacular Humiliation: An Attempt to Make a Pathetic Situation Seem Funny . .99 7 8 More Than a Meal 7. Ignominy, Thy Name is Turkey: The Presidential Pardoning Ceremony . .111 8. The Mind and Behavior of Turkeys . .125 9. Inventing New Traditions . .159 References and Bibliography . .171 Index . .189 Acknowledgments 1 NE OF THE MOST SATISFYING THINGS ABOUT my organization, United Poultry Concerns, is the wealth of O material that people regularly send to my attention regard- ing birds and other matters of ultimate importance. I would like to thank everyone who thus indispensably contributed to the writing of this book as well as the invaluable people whom I specifically engaged to assist in the book’s preparation. They are: David Cantor, who tracked down and commented inci- sively on a variety of Thanksgiving articles and advertisements that appeared in the 20th century; Katy Otto, who made research for my book the focus of her Independent Study in journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, including interviews with the National Turkey Federation; and Andrea Brown, who assisted me in looking up information at the National Agricultural Library as part of her summer internship with United Poultry Concerns a couple of years ago. I am also grateful to A. R. Hogan of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and to the staff at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals for sending me bundles of contemporary newspaper articles about everything from food poisoning to the growth of vegetarianism in America. I am extremely grateful to Peter Singer for graciously reading my manuscript and for his generous endorsement of this book. 9 10 More Than a Meal Finally, I would like to thank Martin Rowe for having chosen to publish my book and for his supreme and expert guidance in bringing it to life. Introduction 1 Milton, Doris, and Some “Turkeys” IN Recent American History Nothing so unites us as gathering with one mind to murder someone we hate, unless it is coming together to share in a meal.—Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner, 33 A tradition is a ritual that has come to represent an aspect of ourselves that we value.—Robin Marantz Hening, USA Today, November 25,1998 DID NOT GROW UP AROUND TURKEYS. NOT UNTIL I was well into adulthood did I actually meet any that I can recall. I My first encounter with turkeys took place at a farmed animal sanctuary in Avondale, Pennsylvania in the late 1980s when I went to work there one summer as a volunteer.1 The turkeys I met at the sanctuary were not wild. They all derived from the meat industry. There was a flock of white turkey hens, about twenty, and two bronze turkeys, a male and a female named Milton and Doris. One of the things that impressed me then, and has stayed in my mind ever since, was the way the turkeys’ voices, their “yelps,” floated about the place in what seemed like an infinitely plaintive refrain. Another was how one or more of the hens would suddenly sit down beside me in the midst of my work, rigid and quivering, with her wings stiff and her head held high, awaiting my attention. 11 12 More Than a Meal The faces of turkeys are fine-boned and their eyes are large, dark, and almond-shaped. Doris, the bronze hen, wandered about the farm- yard all day by herself like an eternal embodiment of a “lost call,” the call of a lost young turkey for its mother. She had a large, soft breast that felt sad to me whenever I picked her up. Milton, the bronze male turkey, followed me (and others) around on his gouty legs and swollen feet. His dark eyes watched us from inside a bristling armor of irides- cent brown feathers and pendant, heavily wrinkled pouches of folded head and facial skin of varying, shifting colors of emotion that to this day makes me think of a body with its soul imprisoned deep inside. Milton plodded behind people, stopping when they stopped, resuming his ponderous tread as they took up their feet again. He would stand before you, or appear unexpectedly at your back, manifesting himself almost scarily at times, decked out in his full array, his tail in a fabu- lous wheel, his wing ends dragging stiffly. Like the hens in their starched white wing skirts, crouched and quivering exactly where you were shoveling the muck, he awaited your response, and like them he would try, try again, patient and determined in his fixed agenda. This, then, was my introduction to turkeys. In 1998, a newspaper in Virginia announced that an interstate highway blocked by construction would no longer be a “turkey” (Messina, A1). Motorists heading home for the holidays could still get there in plenty of time for their Thanksgiving dinner. On a following page we see a photograph of a turkey on a table being touched by President Bill Clinton flanked by two other men with the caption, “Turkey has president to thank for its life” (AP, 1998). A turkey dinner is simple in our society. Few people think about it. Likewise, the turkey as a metaphor of derision scarcely gets a thought from anyone. But the President of the United States “pardoning” a turkey? Is this turkey a malefactor? A criminal? Introduction 13 The view of animals as “innocent” or “guilty” has historical roots in Western society, although moral capability has almost always seemed to translate, in legal terms, into moral culpability in the case of animals. In European legal history, during the Middle Ages, animals were tried, convicted, and executed for killing humans. Pigs were frequently hanged. Laws in which animals were regarded as malefactors are set forth in Exodus 21, which prescribes that an ox that gores either a man or a woman shall be stoned to death, suggesting that bestiality was also a crime for which animals could be held liable and punished like humans (Wise, 25–31). Moral responsibility in animals was, and con- tinues to be, a problem. Negatively speaking, a dog may be dangerous, but is it fair to refer to such a dog as “malicious”? In England, animals were not tried and convicted under penal law, as they were, for example, in France. However, horses, dogs, bears, and other animals were de facto accused of being idle and vicious and accordingly subjected to punishments such as baiting, hanging, and being locked up with a ram (Thomas, 97–98). In the 17th century, following biblical precedent, the English Pilgrims and Puritans in Massachusetts executed both humans and nonhuman animals for bestiality. In 1679, for example, a woman and a dog were hanged together for allegedly committing the sexual act (Thomas, 98). In 1642, a teenaged servant named Thomas Granger was accused of conducting “buggery”—sexual intercourse—with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey (Bradford, 355–356). Discovered raping the mare, Granger not only confessed to having sex with her then, “but sundry times before and at several times with all the rest of the forenamed in his indictment.” He and a fellow sodomite insisted that sexual relations with animals was a custom “long used in old England.”2 Condemned by a jury, Granger was executed on September 8th. William Bradford, the Pilgrim governor of Plymouth Colony who conducted the execution, wrote: 14 More Than a Meal A very sad spectacle it was. For first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle [cattle in the general sense of livestock, i.e. “live property”] were killed before his face, according to the law, Leviticus xx.15; and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a great and large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them. (Bradford, 356) There is then in Western culture a history rooted in Scripture and beyond in which officialdom and nonhuman animals have come together in situations that attached guilt and maleficence to animals. Indeed, there is an entire history of scapegoating, ritual sacrifice, and demonization of animals in which animal victims have been placed in the position of bearing moral responsibility for the good or bad condi- tion of society.

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