Answering PeTA's 10 reasons not to eat turkey

1. They're Begging Your Pardon
The president “pardons” a turkey every year—can't you pardon one too?
Um, no. The president has the authority to pardon based upon the constitution. I don't.

2. Get Rid of Your Wattle
Turkey flesh is brimming with fat. Just one homemade patty of ground, cooked turkey meat contains a whopping 244 mg of cholesterol, and half of its calories come from fat. Which is why I put butter and gravy on it, so ALL the calories come from fat.

3. Can You Spell ‘Pandemic’?
Eating a turkey carcass contaminated with bird flu could kill you, and currently available drugs might not work. Cooking should kill the virus, but it could be left behind on cutting boards and utensils and spread through something else you're eating. Unless, you know, you actually clean up your kitchen.

4. Recall Process Doesn't Fly
The U.S. government is the only government in the Western world that does not have the power to recall contaminated animal products. The Center for Science in the Public Interest found that 28 percent of fresh turkeys were contaminated with bacteria, primarily with campylobacter, for which the USDA does not even require testing. Which is why we cook the turkey first.

5. Let the Turkeys Give Thanks!
Let's face it: If you're eating a turkey, that's a corpse you've got there on the table, and if you don't eat it quickly enough, it will decompose. Is that really what we want as the centerpiece of a holiday meal: an animal's dead and decaying carcass? Thanksgiving is a time to take stock of our lives and give thanks for all that we have, so why not let the turkeys give thanks too? Because turkeys say grace to a different god, they deserve to die and be eaten by Christians.

6. Want Stuffing With Your Supergerms?
Dosing turkeys with antibiotics to stimulate their growth and to keep them alive in filthy, disease-ridden conditions that would otherwise kill them poses even more risks for people who eat them. Leading health organizations—including the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association—have warned that by giving powerful drugs (via animal products) to humans who are not sick, the farmed-animal industry is creating possible long-term risks to human health and will spread antibiotic-resistant supergerms. What about giving powerful superdrugs to humans who are sick? Can sick people eat turkey to get better? It's a thanksgiving miracle!

7. Without a Wing and a Prayer
On factory farms, turkeys live for months in sheds where they are packed so tightly that flapping a wing or stretching a leg is nearly impossible. They stand in waste, and urine and ammonia fumes burn their eyes and lungs. At the slaughterhouse, turkeys have their throats slit while they are still conscious. Those who miss the automated knife are scalded to death in the defeathering tank. and those who miss the knife and defeathering tank are bludgeoned to death by drunken gnomes with hammers. You ever tried to stuff a live turkey into a shrink-wrap bag?

8. Foul Farming
Anyone who has driven by a farm has probably smelled it first from a mile away. Turkeys and other animals raised for food produce 130 times as much excrement as the entire U.S. human population—all without the benefit of waste treatment systems. There are no federal guidelines to regulate how factory farms treat, store, and dispose of the trillions of pounds of concentrated, untreated animal excrement that they produce each year. Often they sell the poop to other farmers for their vegetables to feed vegans...

9. Blood, Sweat, and Fear
Killing animals is inherently dangerous work, but the fast line speeds, the dirty, slippery killing floors, and the lack of training make animal-processing plants some of the most dangerous places to work in America today. The industry has refused to slow down the lines or buy appropriate safety gear because these changes could cut into companies’ bottom lines. In its 185-page exposé on worker exploitation by the farmed-animal industry, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” Human Rights Watch explains, ‘These are not occasional lapses by employers paying insufficient attention to modern human resources management policies. These are systematic human rights violations embedded in meat and poultry industry employment.”
At least we're providing work for Mexicans who would otherwise have to pick vegetables.

10. A Cornucopia of Turkey Alternatives
Give up the giblets and carve out a new tradition this Thanksgiving—Tofurky Roast and UnTurkey, savory soy- and wheat-based roasts with stuffing and gravy or oven-roasted, peppered, hickory-smoked, or cranberry- and stuffing-flavored Tofurky Deli Slices. Give animals and yourself something to be really thankful for this year: Order a free vegetarian starter kit full of tasty recipes and celebrity features today!
Thanks, but the only pasty white flesh I want is inside the turkey.

Enjoy your bird,
and have a happy meat-filled thanksgiving.

--Chuck