Each year 700 millions of turkeys are subjected to painful mutilations auffer from crippling leg and hip problems and spend their entire lives in toxic fumes with thousands of other birds. This is the face of the turkey industry.

The First Day

Turkey poults never meet their mothers. They are born in a concrete hatchery, where they are squeezed and thrown onto a conveyor belt. A worker picks them up and cuts off the end of their toes, debeaks them and puts them on another conveyer belt that delivers them to a carousel where they get an injection, usually of antibiotics, that whacks them in the back of their necks. All this violence is inflicted on the turkey poults when they are a few hours old.

Sheds

At a day old the turkey chicks are transported to the growing sheds with up to 25,000 other chicks, where each has three square feet of floor space. 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.

During the first two weeks of life, these baby birds are extremely vulnerable to diseases. Mortality is highest at this point. 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. In the U.S alone over 30 million turkeys are not murdered at the slaughterhouse, but die as a consequence of the dire living conditions in the sheds.

Every available space of the barn 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.

Debeaking

The conditions in the 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 a painful injury deliberately inflicted by humans in an attempt to 'adapt the bird' to intensive systems.

Diseases

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 and 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.

Other common diseases affecting intensively reared turkeys include Colisepticaemia, blackhead (which damages the liver) and Pasteurella infection, which causes a commonly fatal respiratory disease. Turkeys are also often infected with Salmonella.

Genetic Manipulations

Turkeys in modern production systems are doubly imprisoned:
In filthy pathogen-infested buildings from which they cannot escape, and in alien bodies that frustrate their natural impulses.

Due to the high demand for more and more "white" meat, the genetic selection and inbreeding of domestic turkeys, have resulted in an adult male bird so large that he can weigh up to 40 pounds, about three times the weight of his wild ancestor. This increase in size along with the weight of his massive pectoral 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.

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.

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. 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.

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.
Tens of millions of turkeys suffer from “round heart syndrome” because of the stress of confinement and genetic selection. At an age as young as one week old, they suffer from cardio vascular diseases.

Breeding Stocks

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. The breeding stocks are kept in single sex pens. Males are kept in flocks of 30-50 birds at a stocking density of 1m² per bird.
The hens are kept in larger flocks in even more dense conditions.

In addition to being detoed and debeaked, the males in the breeding stock 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. 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.

To the Slaughterhouse

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, causing 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 to the slaughterhouse.

In The Slaughterhouse

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 turkeys, 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 suffering from degenerative hip disorders. Therefore these birds experience an even greater pain when the rigid steel shackles compress the soft tissue of the shank against the bird's bone. The mature male turkey weighs around 30 pounds, 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 the 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 are not made unconscious because they lift their heads before they get into the tank.
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. There they are submerged in boiling hot water. Birds missed by the killing blade are boiled alive.

Hundreds of millions of turkeys are tortured from birth to murder to be consumed at the thanksgiving feast. The violent feast of ostentation and hypocrisy. The corpse of a 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 by ignorance, violence and contempt to everything around them. Unfortunately it is not surprising at all. A critical examination of humanity’s history on this planet, makes it quite fitting. What is really absurd is that activists keep pointing at humans’ absurdity instead of looking for ways to really end their tyranny.