Each year 700 millions of turkeys are subjected to painful mutilations, suffer from crippling leg and hip problems and spend their entire lives in toxic fumes with thousands of other birds.

Over 100 million turkeys suffer from birth to death in the U.S.A only, for just one-day's celebration.
During a lifetime, just one American devours 65 turkeys. Every piece of flesh consumed is full of agony!

After 28 days in an incubating cabinet the newborn turkeys hatch in a concrete hatchery. They will never meet their mothers
Still totally disoriented and shocked, the chicks are squeezed and thrown onto a conveyor belt. A worker picks them up and pulls the snood off their heads, clips three toes of each foot, debeaks them and puts them on another conveyer belt that delivers them to a carousel where they get a power injection of antibiotic, that whacks them in the back of their necks. All at a few minutes old.

At a day old, the turkey chicks are transported to the growing sheds with up to 25,000 other chicks and three square feet of floor space for each. They are forced to sit and stand in filthy litter, breathing burning ammonia fumes and lung-destroying dust. They develop respiratory diseases, ulcerated feet, blistered breasts and ammonia-burned eyes. The lighting is dim and the heat is kept permanently high. Many chicks die from heat, stress, heart attack or bullying.

During the first two weeks of life, these baby birds are extremely vulnerable to diseases. Mortality is highest at this point. About a million die at their first week of life. Without their mothers for guidance, many poults fail to learn how to reach their food or water, which sentences them to death by starvation or dehydration.

Every available space of the barns is crammed with turkeys, a high volume production that allows factory farmers to dismiss the loss of lower production of individual birds due to stress and disease. The conditions in these dim and crowded sheds lead to damaging behaviors, such as feather pecking and “cannibalism”. Turkeys are therefore debeaked, supposedly to reduce the damage of this behavior.

Debeaking is done to offset the effects of the compulsive pecking but it actually deprives the birds of very basic and fundamental needs, as the beak is crucial for preening, scratching, pecking at the ground and of course feeding.

Debeaking is a painful mutilation deliberately inflicted by humans in an attempt to 'adapt the bird' to intensive systems.

The turkeys stand mired in layers of waste, while urine and ammonia fumes burn their eyes and lungs. They get diseases like turkey Rhinotracheitis (TRT), which makes them cough and sneeze, they get swollen faces and sinusitis. The bodies of the turkeys who died due to the harsh conditions in the shed are left to rot on the filthy floor.
The absence of any stimulation causes such extreme boredom and desperation, that the birds peck everything, even the rotting corpses. Imagine 300,000 turkeys using just 1 room as a toilet.

Modern "production" turkeys are doubly imprisoned:
In filthy pathogen-infested buildings from which they cannot escape and In alien bodies that frustrate their natural impulses.

If a 7-pound human baby grew at the same rate that today's turkey grows, when the baby reaches 18 weeks of age, he would weigh 150 pounds!

Due to a great demand for more and more "white" meat, the genetic selection and inbreeding of domestic turkeys, has resulted in an adult male bird so large that he can weigh up to 80 pounds, four times the weight of his wild ancestors. This increase in size along with the weight of his massive pectoral’s muscle, the so-called "turkey breast", often results in a bird too heavy to stand on his own two feet - his legs are too weak to support him.

A bird too heavy to stand on his own feet his legs are too weak to support him

Turkeys’ legs are too fragile to bear their own weight because their bones cannot keep pace with the high speed growth to huge unnatural sizes, (forced by drugs like zinc bacitracin). Their hips may become displaced. As a result some birds cannot reach food and water thus starve to death, if the diseases don’t kill them first. And turkeys' diseases list is endless.

Turkeys develop congestive heart and lung diseases, accompanied by engorged coronary vessels, distended fluid-filled pericardial sac, abdominal fluid, and a gelatin-covered enlarged congested liver.
Hundreds of thousands of turkeys suffer from “round heart syndrome” because of the stress of confinement and genetic selection. Their hearts explode.
Other common diseases affecting intensively reared turkeys include Colisepticaemia, blackhead (which damages the liver), turkey Rhinotracheitis (TRT), and Pasteurella infection, which causes a commonly fatal respiratory disease. Turkeys are also often infected with Salmonella.

In addition to be altered to grow fast and large, commercial turkeys have been anatomically manipulated to have large breasts, in order to meet consumers’ demand for breast meat. As a result, turkeys cannot reproduce naturally, and so their sole means of reproduction is artificial insemination, thus the breeding stocks are kept in single sex pens. Males are kept in flocks of 30-50 birds at a stocking density of 1m˛ per bird.
The hens are kept in larger flocks at a density of 345cm per kg of bird.
It completely frustrates the natural mating instincts of turkeys and it is distressing for both males and females.

In addition to being detoed and debeaked, the male breeders’ are also desnooded (their snoods are cut off). All these “elective surgeries” involve chronic pain. No anesthetic is given.

The males are "milked" of their semen by phallus manipulating teams, who then stick the semen in the vagina of an upside down turkey hen, with a hypodermic syringe or the operator's breath pressure blown through a tube. This artificial insemination procedure, spreads fowl cholera, a major bacterial disease of domestic turkey.
Artificial insemination is how science calls rape!

As a result of their large size, lameness is a very common disease in male breeding turkeys. Lameness often involves disease of the hip joints, called Antitrochanteric Degeneration. Studies have shown that over 90% of male breeding turkeys suffer degenerative hip disease when they are sent to slaughter. This is a major cause of mortality.

The modern bird's swollen body, distorted physical shape, and inability to mate naturally, is another proof of the cruelty and arbitrariness of the human race.

Domesticated turkeys are far more sensitive than their wild ancestors, they are easily frightened. Entire flocks of turkeys have been known to die of shock at a clap of thunder. Imagine the terror when the "catchers" go into the shed, grab the terrified birds by the legs and roughly stuff them into crates where wings and legs get trapped, hence more broken bones. Then they are transported to the slaughterhouse.

Jammed in crates they travel for hours without food, water or protection from the weather. Millions of turkeys die every year as a result of heat exhaustion, freezing or accidents during transport.

Turkeys are unloaded from the transport crates and hung upside down on the shackles. This is a very stressful and painful process, with aggressive handling. The practice of hanging such heavy birds upside down by their legs on shackles, inflicts enormous pressure on the birds' legs and hips.
Modern turkeys are selectively bred to develop huge meaty breasts. The heavy upper body places excessive strain on the hips and results in many turkeys who suffer from degenerative hip disorders. These birds experience great pain when the rigid steel shackles compress the soft tissue of the shank against the bird's bone. The mature male turkey weighs around the same as 8-9 years old child, yet he is hung upside down on shackles for up to six minutes, before being electrically stunned and murdered.

Furthermore around 50% of the turkeys experience painful, pre-stun electric shocks either because their wings enter the water bath stunner before their heads, or because the entrance ramp to the stunner is electrically alive, due to water splashing out of the stunner. The whole purpose of stunning is to render birds immediately unconscious and thus insensible to pain. This purpose is totally negated if, as often happens, turkeys receive painful electric shocks before being made unconscious or because they lift their heads before they got into the tank.
Somehow the animals always lose. Even the machine that is supposed to reduce their suffering, ends up increasing it.

After passing through the stunning tank, the birds' throats are slashed, usually by a mechanical blade, and blood begins to rush out of their bodies. Inevitably, the blade misses some birds who then proceed to the next station on the assembly line, the scalding tank. Here they are submerged in boiling hot water.
Birds missed by the killing blade are boiled alive!

A dead turkey is what symbolizes more than anything, a holyday that is supposed to symbolize humans’ thankfulness to god for all the wealth he supposedly gave them. It seems to be absurd that even the day that symbolizes humans’ gratitude to god, nature and everything around them, they celebrate it by ignorance, violence and contempt to everything around them.
Hundreds of millions of turkeys are tortured for months, murdered and eaten in the thanksgiving feast.
A violent feast of ostentation and hypocrisy.
It symbolizes how greedy and boastful humans are. Not modest and grateful.
Unfortunately it is not surprising that this is their thanks.
A critical examination of humans’ nature and of life in general, makes it very logical. And when atrocities like these are logical…
What is your dilemma?