Food for Thought This Thanksgiving |
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November 24, 2008
by Michael Markarian
It’s Thanksgiving week, and The Humane Society of the United States is reminding people about the Three R’s of holiday eating: Refine the methods of industrial farm animal production to minimize pain and distress to animals; reduce the amount of meat, egg, and dairy products for a more sustainable diet; and replace animal products with vegetarian options.
Further food for thought on the subject comes from Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
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| "What's particularly troubling is Palin's tone" as turkeys behind her are slaughtered. |
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In a disturbing new video making the rounds, she “pardons” a turkey at the Triple D Farm & Hatchery outside Wasilla.
Then she lightheartedly holds a general news conference while live turkeys in the background are fed into an inverted cone for throat-slitting and bleeding, shuddering while their necks are cut.
As AOL News blogger Tommy Christopher said, it’s the kind of video that might make someone switch to meat alternatives like Tofurky.
Or, as Time magazine’s Ana Marie Cox said on MSNBC’s “Countdown” with Keith Olbermann, “She does have this very special relationship with animals … it involves blood usually.”
It’s no secret that animals are killed for food. What’s particularly troubling is Palin's jovial tone.
Whether you think it's appropriate or not to slaughter animals for food, never should it be treated as a joke, nor anything less than a serious moral matter.
Marc Lester of the Anchorage Daily News has video of the pre-slaughter “pardoning,” which hasn’t been as widely distributed. When reading her Thanksgiving pardon proclamation, Palin says she is a “friend to all creatures great and small”—but elbows the farmer next to her in the ribs as if to emphasize the big joke.
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Turkeys aren't covered under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act.© iStock.com |
If there’s any silver lining to the latest Palin interaction with animals, it just might cause people to think about the plight of turkeys. The gory scenes in Palin's video are actually much less severe than we'd see at a major turkey factory farm or industrialized slaughter plant.
In today’s factory farms, turkeys are overcrowded in automated, barren poultry houses, without the ability to engage in many natural behaviors.
They are bred to grow at an unnaturally rapid pace to unprecedented weights, causing skeletal, muscular, and leg disorders.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture currently applies the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act only to mammals (yet even excludes some of them, such as rabbits), and refuses to extend these basic federal protections to the nearly ten billion turkeys, chickens, and other poultry raised for food each year.
There are many ways to express thanks this holiday. One of them is to reflect on what we eat and why. Even a recent Wall Street Journal article highlighted the versatility and variety of vegetarian Thanksgiving foods.
• Learn how you can help turkeys and other farm animals by implementing the 3 R's.
• Read The HSUS Guide to Vegetarian Eating for the whys and hows of eating more humanely.
• Check out some humane holiday meals.
Michael Markarian is Executive Vice President of The HSUS. This article was adapted from his blog at the Humane Society Legislative Fund, where he serves as president.
