Someone at the National Turkey Federation once had an idea: Let’s send a live turkey to Harry Truman for a presidential holiday feast! Previously, some individual turkey producers had sent their products to the president to promote them, but the greater resources of the National Turkey Federation meant that the story could be promoted more effectively.
The turkey sent to President Truman was killed and eaten, as were turkeys subsequently sent to President Dwight Eisenhower. But in 1963, in one of his last official acts before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy, when face to face with his live turkey, disregarded the sign hung around the bird’s neck that read “Good eating, Mr. President” and said: “Let’s keep him going.” Kennedy didn’t say anything about pardoning the turkey, but media referred to his act as a “pardon” and “reprieve.” President George H.W. Bush was the first to pretend that a turkey was receiving an official pardon.
We pardon people for crimes they have committed. Modern law has long abandoned the view that animals can commit crimes. That makes it impossible to take seriously the idea that turkeys need to be pardoned, no matter what they have done, but the annual presidential pardon is doubly absurd because no one has ever claimed that the turkeys sent to the president have done anything wrong — not even in the sense that your cat does something wrong when she punishes you for going on vacation by using your bed as her litter box.
The turkeys pardoned by President Biden last Thanksgiving were supplied by America’s largest turkey producer, Jennie-O Turkey Store, part of the giant Hormel Foods Corporation. Jennie-O could well afford to donate two turkeys to the president; in recent years, the company received well over $100 million from the federal government as compensation for the deaths of turkeys affected by bird flu. Other turkey producers also received many millions of dollars, part of a huge subsidy for U.S. turkey and chicken producers.
Bird flu is now endemic in the United States, and all turkey and chicken producers know that there is a risk that some of the birds they are raising will get bird flu. When that happens, they must typically kill their entire flocks in the sheds in which they are raised. (I will spare you the details of the methods used to do this — it suffices to say that one widely used method is prohibited, on animal welfare grounds, throughout the European Union and for the same reason is not used in the United Kingdom or Australia.)
The normal response to risk is insurance, the cost of which is a component of the total production cost of almost every commercial enterprise. When the government instead provides that compensation for losses owing to bird flu, taxpayers who choose not to eat turkey are forced to pay to make turkey cheaper for those who do eat it.
There are good reasons some people choose not to eat turkey. The turkeys eaten by Americans today are nothing like the wild turkeys supposedly eaten by the early European settlers in Massachusetts at the original Thanksgiving. More than 99 percent of the roughly 250 million turkeys produced in the United States each year are raised on factory farms, according to the Sentience Institute, crowded indoors all their lives in large sheds that almost always contain thousands of birds.
Today’s turkeys are not treated by turkey producers as individual birds capable of enjoying their lives, but as machines that convert cheap crops (which are also often subsidized) to something that can be sold at a higher price. The 46 million turkeys killed and eaten at Thanksgiving are almost all “broad-breasted whites,” selectively bred to have abnormally large breasts, because that is the part that most people prefer to eat. These birds have bodies so misshapen that they usually cannot reproduce on their own. They are the result of artificial insemination, which, especially for the females, is a procedure that they resist, but in vain.
Turkeys are also bred to grow fast so that they are ready for slaughter at 3 to 5 months old. Their immature leg bones struggle to carry their weight. One study found that 60 percent had foot swelling and 25 percent had arthritis. They are often lame because they experience pain when walking or standing. Sitting on the litter that covers the floor is not a good option, either, because the litter is full of bird droppings, which, when they come in contact with moist skin, can cause caustic burns and blisters.
By the time Thanksgiving comes around, Mr. Biden will have less than two months of his term of office remaining. In common parlance, he will be a lame duck president. I suggest that he take that term, with its connotations of ceasing to be important, and give it a twist. He could become a lame turkey president — that is, a president who takes a stand on behalf of lame turkeys, by refusing to take part in the silly tradition of pardoning them.
If we insist on sticking with the idea of pardoning someone for Thanksgiving, it is the heads of the giant corporations profiting from the industrial production of turkeys who are in need of a pardon. But to deserve it, they would first have to show remorse for what they have done.
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