Three weeks before Americans sit down to eat 46 million turkeys in one day, police brought animal cruelty charges against two men carrying a single turkey with a broken leg [“Two men face charges over injured turkey,” Gazette, Oct. 31]. Officers on the scene determined the turkey “was being unnecessarily tormented.” The impulse to save this animal was correct. It seems likely that turkeys are conscious and can experience pain, which means their lives can go better or worse. That fact can oblige us to protect an animal from harm, especially when it’s a trivial matter for someone to help. What’s more, the intuition to prevent suffering should scale. We should extend the same consideration to each of the over 200 million turkeys Americans slaughter each year.
To increase profits, farmers select turkeys for fast growth, which makes turkeys prone to leg fractures as their bones are unable to adequately support extremely rapid muscle development. According to the Poultry Science Association, an industry organization, fractures that require culling occur in somewhere between two and 10 percent of turkeys raised for food.
If parading a turkey with a broken leg is animal cruelty, surely subjecting millions of turkeys to broken legs in factory farms is too. Yet animals raised for food are specifically excluded from the federal Animal Welfare Act. Nor does the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act protect poultry. Massachusetts offers more animal protections than most states. Unfortunately, by treating turkeys as machines for producing meat we’ve genetically encoded cruelty into these animals and there is no law against that. Gross lack of compassion is inherent to the continued breeding of the modern domesticated turkey.
Serving Thanksgiving turkey is a tradition but one that unnecessarily contributes to the torment of millions of animals. In their defense, the two college-age men could claim to have been engaged in a Thanksgiving parade which, one could argue, is a longstanding tradition that justifies animal torment. But that would be ridiculous.
Nate Heard
Shutesbury