The images in the following program are very sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals, praying that you will help to stop it.

Each year in the United States, the fourth Thursday of every November is a national holiday called Thanksgiving. It is a time to enjoy a sumptuous meal with family and friends and give thanks to God. However for turkeys, the approach of this day only means anguish and death.

The act of having turkey for Thanksgiving dinner or for any other occasion can in no way be considered celebratory; instead it is an inhumane and senseless exploitation of our innocent fellow beings. This week on the Stop Animal Cruelty series we examine the utter brutality of the heartless turkey industry.

The US-based non-profit organization, In Defense of Animals’ (IDA’s) stated mission is “to end animal exploitation, cruelty, and abuse by protecting and advocating for the rights, welfare, and habitats of animals, as well as to raise their status beyond mere property, commodities, or things.” Today’s program features excerpts from an episode of the In Defense of Animals-produced television series “Undercover TV.”

Undercover TV is hosted by Mr. Kenneth G. Williams, a vegan professional body builder from the United States and a spokesperson for In Defense of Animals’s veganism campaign.

Let us now hear about the extremely short, trauma-filled lives of factory-farmed turkeys.

Every year, over 300 million turkeys are killed for food in the US. This video exposes the animal cruelty that is prevalent in the turkey industry.

The turkey is the only domesticated farm animal native to North America. At one time, turkeys roamed vast expanses from the Atlantic Coast to what is now Arizona (USA) and from the Great Lakes to Central America. Fossil evidence indicates that turkeys have been here for 10 million years.

However with the arrival of the European settlers, the wild turkey population decreased dramatically. Commercial hunters would shoot entire flocks, and sell the birds for six cents apiece. Forests, the birds’ natural habitat, were cleared and turned into pasture and crop land.

By 1900 only small populations of the once great flocks still existed in North America and there was an increased interest in domesticating the turkey. During the 1950s, new developments in agribusiness, technology, genetic engineering, and drug and chemical usage, revolutionized turkey production and paved the way for today’s US$3 billion turkey industry.

Today, practically all commercial turkeys are raised in large-scale intensive confinement systems appropriately called factory farms. A typical farm produces between 30,000 and 1 million birds a year. And while the farmers treat them as production units, each bird is an individual and experiences pain much like any other animal.

I have been in so many factory farms when we are doing undercover investigations I would go out for particular cases and when you see just for instance a shed full of thousands, literally thousands of say turkeys, in there, it’s just a sea of white turkeys. They have got hardly any air in there, they see no daylight they are just living in excrement. The smell in those places of ammonia – it’s something you can’t capture on footage. And those birds, they suffer horrendously just for people to eat.

The turkey industry has aggressively promoted its product, and (US) per capita turkey consumption has doubled over the past two decades – increasing from around 10 pounds, per person, per year in the late 1970s to 20 pounds per person today. As demand for turkey flesh increased, the industry came to value breeds of turkeys who grew faster and larger.

Turkey breeders altered the size and shape of the birds, giving them larger breasts. Because this anatomical manipulation has made it impossible for domestic turkeys to mount and reproduce naturally, producers rely on artificial insemination as the sole means of reproduction. Today’s commercially produced turkeys are more than twice as large as their ancestors. They’re so large that their legs have difficulty holding up their bodies.

An industry journal laments: “Turkeys have been bred to grow faster and heavier, but their skeletons haven’t kept pace, which causes “cowboy-legs.” Commonly, the turkeys have problems standing and fall, and are trampled on.” Besides growing large, modern turkeys have been genetically-engineered to grow abnormally fast.

Comparing a turkey’s growth rate to that of a human baby, an industry newspaper explains, “If a seven pound baby grew at the same rate that today’s turkey grows, when the baby reaches 18 weeks-of-age, it would weigh 1,500 pounds.” This rapid growth places the animals’ bodies under severe stress, causing hundreds of thousands to die before reaching the slaughterhouse every year.

Fast growing turkeys commonly die from heart attacks, or internal bleeding resulting from aortic rupture, or kidney hemorrhage. Turkey producers have also chosen to breed white turkeys, rather than the traditional bronze-colored breeds because bronze-feathers leave pigment in the bird’s flesh and consumers prefer not to see any color on the carcass.

Each year, more than 300 million turkeys are bred for slaughter in the United States. Breeding hens are artificially inseminated and lay eggs, which are immediately taken away from them. The turkey hens are subjected to an artificial environment and induced to lay around 90 eggs in a 25-week-period. In nature the hens only lay between four to 16 eggs in a year.

Back on the factory farm, after six months of intensive egg-laying, the hens are considered “spent” and sent off to slaughter. The fertilized eggs are placed in incubators, and in four weeks they hatch. The newborns never see their mothers.

From the hatchery, turkeys may be transported more than 1,000 miles before reaching the place where they’ll be raised. Most turkeys live out their lives in intensive confinement buildings, where they’re crowded by the thousands. When the birds are first placed in the buildings, they’re small and have room to move. However, within a few weeks they grow substantially and space becomes limited. Birds often weighing more than 28 pounds are allotted only three square-feet of space.

In these overcrowded conditions, acute stress, heat prostration, smothering, disease, and respiratory maladies kill millions of turkeys each year before the slaughterhouse can. Unable to exercise or move freely, the birds become extremely agitated and are driven to pecking and fighting.

In order to reduce the resulting injuries and deaths, the birds are debeaked, de-snooded, and declawed – painful procedures which involve clipping and burning parts of the animals’ bodies, without anaesthesia. The stress of these mutilations is sometimes fatal. In intensive confinement turkey production, human contact with the birds is extremely limited.

Feeding and watering are completely automated, and illness and disease go undetected. When modern turkey producers do walk through their flocks, it’s usually to remove dead or dying birds. Perhaps the greatest hazards of mechanized watering and feeding is that these systems have the potential to break down.

The birds are completely dependent on these systems, and if they fail, tens of thousands of birds can die, slowly. Turkeys also die in hot weather when factory farm temperature control systems are unable to maintain liveable conditions.

In modern day turkey production where thousands of birds are kept in minimal space, turkey manure becomes a problem too. The floors of turkey houses reek of urine and feces. Disease is a constant threat, as the birds are forced to breathe the thick, stagnant air. Factory farm conditions are so unhealthy, that one in every ten turkeys hatched is expected to die. Death is actually written into the industry’s profit structure.

Turkey producers are in business to make a profit. They seek to minimize cost while maximizing return. The turkeys themselves are seen solely as commodities, products for sale. Turkeys rarely receive adequate veterinary care in mass production systems. The monetary value attributed to individual birds is less than it would cost turkey producers to treat them.

And so sick birds typically go untreated. Instead of diagnosing and caring for individual turkeys, turkey producers put their whole flock on a drug program. Drugs like penicillin, bacitracin, chlortetracycline, terramycin, sulfa drugs and others, are administered in the turkeys’ feed and water. Whether the birds are sick or not, they are given drugs. Turkey feed is formulated to result in maximum growth at a minimal cost.

After being forced to live in crowded, wretched conditions for several months, the birds are herded into crates and trucked off to slaughter. At the slaughterhouse, frightened turkeys are hung upside down by their legs as they struggle to free themselves, wing and leg injuries occur. The birds are carried on a conveyor belt to a stunning tank, where an electric current passing through water stuns the turkeys, supposedly rendering them unconscious.

Often the stunning tank is ineffective and fully conscious animals continue on a conveyor belt toward human butchers or automatic cutting machines. Here we see a conscious turkey emerge from the stunning tank. Speed, not humane consideration, guides the slaughter process and blatant cruelties are allowed to exist.

Today's slaughter plant assembly lines are moving faster than ever, killing thousands of turkeys per hour. Human butchers and automatic cutting devices forced to work at high speeds are often inaccurate, and when the knife misses its mark, birds are boiled alive in the scolding tank.

Now live birds in these tanks of water pose another risk as well to human’s health, because these birds are more likely to defecate in the water if they’re still alive. So it literally becomes a pool of fecal water and it gets on the hides of these birds and it can get into the food supply and cause salmonella, and other issues. Here a turkey has fallen off the conveyor belt and is left bleeding on the floor. The bird is left to die, slowly and painfully.

Imagine for a moment living as a turkey in a factory farm. Imagine a room so filled with bodies that you can’t move about and you are so heavy your legs buckle beneath you. The floor is completely covered in excrement and the sickening smell fills your nostrils with every breath you take.

Eventually you are sent off to be electrocuted, followed by being viciously cut to pieces or boiled alive. Please, please have mercy; choose the compassionate organic vegan lifestyle and save the lives of our turkey and other lovely animal friends.

Many thanks In Defense of Animals as well as Kenneth Williams for sincerely seeking an end to the senseless slaughter of our innocent animal co-inhabitants. Through our life-affirming collective efforts, may all beings soon live in peace and harmony on our shared Earth.

For more details on In Defense of Animals, please visit www.IDAUSA.org
A DVD of Undercover TV episodes is available at the same website

Thank you for your company on today’s program. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment, following Noteworthy News. May all of God’s precious beings always be treated with the love and respect they deserve.