Robin Raven

“The legend that one hundred odd English men and women who landed at Plymouth Harbor feasted on turkey and all the trimmings is a myth,” says Ryan Berry, Ph.D and historian. “When they first arrived on November 11, 1620, the settlers had so little food they raised the houses of the Native American inhabitants and made off with stores of beans and corn. There was simply no animal flesh to be had.”

Thanksgiving was first declared a national holiday in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln, who stated, “I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.”

About the turkey: “Frequently, this remarkable bird (the turkey) is wrongly portrayed as stupid and clumsy. Part of the reason for these incorrect descriptions of the turkey has to do with our species cruelly breeding this animal for fast growth and unnaturally large size,” she says.

Lancaster Farming reports, “If a seven pound [human] 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.”

The genetic engineering and inbreeding of turkeys has resulted in an adult male bird so large it is too heavy to stand on its own two feet, forcing him to squat in his own filth. The abnormal girth also makes natural mating impossible and virtually all turkey breeding is done through artificial insemination where workers hold down the turkeys in a painful and fear inducing manner, then rape them with the insemination.

The way that turkeys are slaughtered, they are pushed down on fast-moving conveyer belts. The horrified turkeys are pulled through an electrifying spray before someone cuts their throats. An unacceptable number reach the scalding station fully conscious.
There are no laws in the United States, as in other nations, to regulate the raising, transport or slaughter of poultry. This is a lot of suffering for a product with more cholesterol, saturated fat and Salmonella than taste.

Thanksgiving, to me, is a celebration of gratitude, not a brutal ritual in which humans are the thieves of life, playing god to God’s creatures, which were created for reasons of their own. God’s ideal is the Garden of Eden, where all creatures live together in peace, for reasons of their own. The common sense reason is also for health, and in natural empathy of those that share the same pain that we feel as living creatures.

There are almost limitless food choices for a vegetarian Thanksgiving. There’s Tofurky (Litelife and Tofurky are among the tastiest brands I’ve tried), tons of vegetables, stuffing (there are tons of vegetarian variety, even some of Pepperidge Farms in most grocers), creative varieties of salad, breads and rolls, cakes and desserts, dozens of kinds of pies, and so many things that I could list all day. If you live in Los Angeles, Whole Foods is doing a vegan dinner and so is Real Food Daily.

“The first Pilgrim/Indian Thanksgiving in 1621 was not only almost certainly turkeyless, it was mainly vegetarian. We should be celebrating Thanksgiving not as an orgy of turkey slaughter, but as a vegetarian harvest festival,” said Rynn Berry, Ph.D Historian.