The Unspeakable Horrors Beyond Comprehension That We Inflict On Thanksgiving Turkeys

However bad you think the treatment of turkeys is, it's worse

In his recent book, Peter Singer details the systematic torment of the tens of millions of Thanksgiving turkeys killed every year, the overwhelming majority of whom are factory farmed. I’ve spent years reading about factory farming—it was worse even than I expected. Reading about the grotesque horrors is enough to make one want to vomit—and certainly never eat turkey again. For example, quite early in the book, this there’s this description:

Now that you know how most US turkeys are conceived, you also have a way to fill those awkward silences that can occur around the Thanksgiving table. Just ask the family and friends gathered together if they know how the bird they are eating was conceived. If they don’t, enlighten them. Then ask them whether ensuring that everyone can get a generous slice of turkey breast is worth breeding a misshapen bird who cannot mate, requiring poorly paid workers to spend all day masturbating male turkeys and pushing open the vaginas of female turkeys, who hate the procedure, but have no escape from it until they are sent off to be killed.

This may sound like hyperbole. It’s not.

Have you ever wondered how the turkeys are produced? The industry has a problem with producing turkeys, because they’ve genetically engineered the turkeys to be too large to breed properly. A turkey in the wild is only 8 pounds by the age of four months, while the turkeys we confine are 41 pounds by that time. This is the equivalent of a 4-month-old baby being over 75 pounds.

So, how do they produce more turkeys? They employ a procedure that we would uncontroversially call rape if done to a human, yet is given the clinical name artificial insemination. This involves holding down a male turkey, forcibly masturbating him, collecting the semen in a beaker, holding down a female turkey, and forcibly injecting the male semen into the female turkey, even as she thrashes and tries to get away. In nature, female turkeys evolved to be quite selective about those they mate with, and unsurprisingly find the experience terrifying. Those injecting the turkey semen into the female turkeys do this ghastly procedure about once every 12 seconds. One person who worked in the industry described:

The hens weigh 20 to 30 pounds and are terrified, beating their wings and struggling in panic. They go through this every week for more than a year, and they don’t like it. Once you have grabbed her with one hand, you flop her down chest first on the edge of the pit with the tail end sticking up. You put your free hand over the vent and tail and pull the rump and tail feathers upward. At the same time, you pull the hand holding the feet downward, thus “breaking” the hen so that her rear is straight up and her vent open. The inseminator sticks his thumb right under the vent and pushes, which opens it further until the end of the oviduct is exposed. Into this, he inserts a straw of semen connected to the end of a tube from an air compressor and pulls a trigger, releasing a shot of compressed air that blows the semen solution from the straw and into the hen’s oviduct. Then you let go of the hen and she flops away.

Unsurprisingly, this is similarly unpleasant for the humans working in the industry. The same worker described:

It was the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work I have ever done. For ten hours we grabbed and wrestled birds, jerking them upside down, facing their pushed-open assholes, dodging their spurting shit, while breathing air filled with dust and feathers stirred up by panicked birds. Through all that, I received a torrent of verbal abuse from the foreman and others on the crew. I lasted one day.

So that’s where turkeys come from. The industry holds down female turkeys and injects male turkey semen into them so that they can continue producing hideous monstrosities too large and disabled to breed, because that produces more turkey flesh. In addition, the breeder turkeys are systematically starved—Singer writes:

Here is the problem: if the breeders are fed as much as they want, they will, over their longer lives, grow even more obese than their shorter-lived offspring, develop even more severe skeletal abnormalities, and cheat their producers by dying from heart disease or organ failure before they have produced enough semen or eggs to pay for the cost of rearing them. Producers overcome this problem by giving the parent birds only half as much food as they would eat if they could. This practice is also used with parent birds in the chicken industry, and behavioral studies there have shown that birds restricted to half-rations are chronically hungry and search in vain for food. It is unlikely to be any different for the parent turkeys.

On the farms, the turkeys prepared for food rather than breeding are subject to similar cruelties. They begin their lives by being debeaked, wherein their beaks are sliced off with a hot knife. Their beaks are filled with nerves—this probably feels roughly like having your nose cut off. Often, they’re mutilated in more ways: by the removal of their snood (the red part on their neck), wing feathers, and the claw on the back of the leg. All of these probably feel roughly like having one of your fingers was removed.

The turkeys spend most of their lives dormant, in vast sheds where they don’t have enough space to move around. Because they’ve been bred to be so large, they cannot move comfortably, so they spend most of their time lying down. This leaves them constantly exposed to the acidic shit and ammonia that covers the floor, leaving them with constant injury. This means that they’re in constant pain whether they stand or sit.

A natural turkey behavior involves perching in their nests. In factory farms, turkeys try to perch on the feed and water lines. To prevent this, the industry puts electric wires around the feed and water lines, so that when the turkeys try to perch, they receive extremely powerful electric shocks. The turkeys are so distressed that they often continually try to perch and continue getting powerful electric shocks. Sometimes they get tangled up in the wires and are electrocuted to death.

The sheds the turkeys live in smell about as bad as anything could. Singer notes:

If you enter the shed, the first thing that will hit you is a burning sensation in your eyes and throat, as they react to the ammonia in the air, which in turn comes from the droppings of thousands of birds, accumulated for up to a year in the sawdust or wood shavings that cover the floor. Although each batch of birds is sent to slaughter after about 3 to 4 months, in the United States, unless there is an outbreak of disease, sheds are typically only cleaned out once a year.

Because the turkeys go insane as a result of the cruel conditions, a large percentage of the turkeys suffer injuries from other turkeys. These injuries are often significant—a bit like if you spent your life locked in a tiny shed with crazy people trying to bite you. Physical abuse is often routine—those who work in the slaughterhouses are disproportionately low empathy and operate on a tight schedule. As a result, one gets scenarios like the following, routinely reported via undercover investigations:

At a plant that shackles and kills about 50,000 birds every day, the PETA investigator saw a worker trying to get a turkey out of a crate when its foot was stuck in the crate’s wire. The worker simply ripped the turkey’s foot off its body.

The main way that the turkeys are killed is that they have their throats slit. Before this, they’re supposed to be stunned, so they are passed through an electric stunner that’s supposed to render them unconscious. However, in the U.S. there’s no such stunning requirement, so many of them have their throats slit while conscious.

Sometimes, however, the turkeys are killed in a much crueler way known as ventilation shutdown. This occurs when large numbers of them need to be euthanized because of a bird flu outbreak. As a consequence, the barn they’re in is shut down, and boiling steam is pumped into the barn, so that they suffocate and roast alive. This is one of the cruelest fates imaginable, and yet it’s routinely used as a way to kill turkeys.

This Thanksgiving, opt out of eating the carcasses of animals that were produced by something we’d uncontroversially call sexual assault if done to humans, done so that the industry can continue to breed hideous fleshy monstrosities too large to breed, and then tortured for their entire lives in a dark shed where they can barely move, are subject to routine injury, and lie in acidic feces all the time. Turkey may taste good, but it’s not worth that.