By the time this article is printed, the annual holocaust of the Turkeys will have passed again. 46 million gobblers will be harvested in the abattoirs to supply the dining room tables of a public ravenous for their Thanksgiving holiday feast. And Christmas is still coming.
According to an estimate compiled by the Sentience Institute, an organization which studies the application of concentric circles of moral consideration, 99.8% of most turkeys bred for food in the United States are born, live and die in factory farms.
Animal rights organization The Farm Sanctuary, describes them as “consisting of large numbers of animals raised in extreme confinement, who undergo painful mutilations and are bred to grow fast and large before being slaughtered at a young age.”
It’s of some small comfort then that the lives of factory farm turkeys are so short. Serving the goals of maximum profit and minimum fuss, these millions of feathered creatures only have to endure 18 to 20 weeks before they are set free.
During this time though, the clandestine pictures smuggled out by animal rights activists unerringly resemble scenes lifted from snuff films – photographs of deranged, abused looking creatures more often than not lit up by a camera flash in the darkness of the only world they will ever know: a factory barn reeking of ammonia and fear.
Unloved. Unnamed. Unsung. Recognizing the hell communicated in a factory-farmed turkey’s solid black eye, if we will not stop eating them, at least here in the Hudson Valley, there are increasingly more opportunities to consume turkeys raised and slaughtered within more humane operations – voting with our dollar, as it were.
Interviewed at the Frank D. Greco memorial recreation center in Saugerties, where the farmer’s market vendors have gathered indoors for a pre-Thanksgiving event, Joe Oliver is in his third year running a small farm “over the mountains” in the Catskills called Thistledown Farm. Though the slaughter of his livestock in the end is the point, the interim of their existence on earth at least resembles paradise.
“Naturally raised, pasture raised, or forest raised,” Oliver explained, “All outside. Plenty of room to grow, plenty of natural forage and feed, depending on the animal. The pigs are in the woods with the oak trees and the various fruit trees and they love it in there. And then the sheep out in the pasture. We try to keep it kind of natural.”
Unhappiness tastes bad, posits Oliver. Anecdotally, it’s the hormones released and sickness which results from unrelenting stress that spoils the meat. Oliver agrees.
“It’s not just how you kill the animal, it’s the process leading up to it, and all that discomfort that they experience,” he says. “With industrial production, before the animal is taken to the killing floor, there’s lots of standing around waiting to die.”
Big slaughter facilities have thousands of animals brought to them in a day. The animals have been packed into dark trailers and driven great distances. When they arrive, they are unloaded into areas unfamiliar and held alongside scores of other animals, also unfamiliar, for long periods of time. They are frightened.
“And this is the period where there’s discomfort,” Oliver says. By contrast Oliver’s animals don’t ever leave his farm.
“We take the animals to a different part of the farm, but they don’t move very far as opposed to a commercial thing where they truck them out, you know, a day away. So they’re always kind of in a familiar place.”
Dressed in a turkey costume in the parking lot of the Ulster County Supreme Court, selling her meats at the Kingston Farmers market, Amanda Biezynski agrees. The owner of North Wind farms in Tivoli, doesn’t understand cutting corners on the moral obligation the farmer has to their livestock.
“We butcher them ourselves,” says Biezynski. “Our butcher has a couple stalls for every animal. They’re not all crammed into one kill room. And while they’re raised, there’s no cages. No antibiotics. They’re roaming free. No hormones. We’re not in a rush to get our animals butchered. When they’re ready, they’re ready. I’ve got a regular customer who told me, ‘I feel good about buying from you because your animals have the best life and only one bad day.’
Which has the ring of a practiced line, but no less true for its repetition. Anyone who cares can drive out to Tivoli to see the farm – 250 acres worth. The animals aren’t crammed together. The young cows with plastic tags on their ears, have space to roam and socialize, under the open sky.
When not selling their slaughtered livestock at the Woodstock or Kingston Farmers markets, the Biezynski’s do business selling butchered meat out of a building on the farm. The meat couldn’t be any fresher.
“The thing with the big guys, their turkeys are butchered early in the year, in January, in February, for November. They’re done for the summer because then the wholesalers get their orders – like Hannaford’s will put in the order, Walmart will put in their order – and they get shipped and they’re frozen.
Which is all part of the magic underpinning how a chain store supermarket operates. The largest of them wield unmatched purchasing power, with their products stored and then supplied from distribution centers. Economies of a staggering scale.
Their business model flourishes in a stratum of low profit margins, because they buy in bulk and succeed through the sheer volume of their sales.
In the United States, Kroger, who owns Hannaford, reports the operation of 2,750 grocery retail stores. Walmart’s share of the market accounts for 4,606 stores. And every one of them must have hundreds of turkeys to sell, supplied from vast freezers stocked full all around the country.
In the end, it appears that the industrialized conditions of cruelty endured by the turkeys – and by the pigs, the cows, the chickens, and the rest of the livestock singled out for the larder – are the result, by and large, not of sadistic factory hands and malignant investors, but a sincere and almost religious devotion to the orthodoxy of efficiency.
Seen from the turkey’s eye, there’s not much difference.
Killing
If to be humane is also to be moral, then the idea that any execution of an animal can be considered humane must support scrutiny.
In most small farm operations in the Hudson Valley and beyond, the process up to the end of dispatching turkeys works like this. A bird is turned upside down, carried by its hocks, and lowered head-first into an apparatus called a killing cone, which resembles an upside-down parking cone made of stainless steel. Their head appears out of the bottom opening. As they contemplate the world upside-down, their jugular artery is severed with a knife – a process called exsanguination – and the sudden loss of blood induces a state of shock, a muted painlessness it is hoped that is on the order of what is experienced after breaking an arm. Their consciousness bleeds out quickly with their blood and the ordeal is over in seconds.
Working the Kingston Farmer’s Market stand for Highland Farm – a livestock farm running operations out of Germantown – the worker there attempts to define the quality of humaneness in killing an animal.
“It means they have no idea what’s happening, and then they die instantly and no other animals around them know what’s happened,” she says. “When we humanely slaughter our animals, there’s no adrenaline in their bodies. No fear.”
Though she’s stopped eating red meat for health reasons, she still eats chicken, and because she works the farmers market it’s convenient for her to buy from other vendors. She likes knowing that the animals aren’t ushered into the afterlife in any machine-like way.
“And I have a preference where I like to know how it’s raised,” she says. “And you can tell, because the cuts from everything are smaller, there’s no antibiotics, there’s no hormones.”
That is, the poultry hasn’t been chemically altered to the grotesque proportions of factory farm birds, with thighs and breasts so large as to prevent the possibility of mating. The next generation must be provided for by the introduction of hypodermic needles or straw.
According to the Farm Sanctuary, which operates a paradise for rescued farm animals in the Village of Watkins Glen at the southern tip of Seneca Lake, turkeys are “bright, social, sentient creatures.”
And the devious hunters scouting their ambushes of wild turkeys will tell you that they gather in large flocks, and roost up in trees. The male of the species, the Tom, when confronting another turkey is known to strut, wing tips in the dirt, tail fanned out, in a performative demonstration of ability for the hens or a display meant to intimidate other Toms, depending on what the occasion calls for. Whichever it is, they are dancing. They take dust baths. They scratch and forage for acorns. They learn things from each other. Their wattles change color to reflect their feelings. They can see light on the ultraviolet spectrum. And they can fly in short bursts over short distances.
The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that currently there are more than 24,000 factory farms operating in the country, and with a captive population of population of an estimated 1.7 billion – that is to say, a number 47% more than roughly twenty years ago – it’s unlikely the business of wholesale industrialized slaughter is going anywhere anytime soon.
And yet, even if the factory farms have pushed livestock outside the circle of their moral consideration, there is no requirement that the local livestock operations imitate them. There is every incentive for meat-eaters to reward them with their business, if only for the quality of their product and there are less barriers preventing the willing, but cash-poor, from doing so. The fact is, raising livestock outside of industrial scale efficiencies isn’t cheap, but many farmer’s markets where humanely raised meat is sold – Kingston, Woodstock, New Paltz, Saugerties to name a few – redeem Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, allowing lower income brackets to access the vendors.
And individual farms are also innovating with strategies to make their meat more affordable to those who can least afford it. Thistledown Farm has been working to get a farm food fund off the ground
“So people who are paying the food stamps, they get a certain amount additionally taken off, 30%, 40%, 50%, based on donations from people rounding up their purchases to try and make it a little bit more accessible,” says Oliver. “We’re going to trial that next year and see if individual customers are interested in contributing to that.”
With Thanksgiving past, the Christmas jingles have already begun being piped out in the supermarket aisles, that music which heralds the approach of the last great slaughter of the year for those creatures not already bagged and stored in the deep freeze.
When buying meat, consider the livestock farms in the Hudson Valley, accessible by car to take a look at the operation, or selling available product at the pre-christmas farmers markets, and cutting out the cold efficiency of factory farms altogether.
For more information about the livestock farms mentioned in this article:
eat-better-meat.com (Highland Farms)
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