Victor is a 20kg turkey who would be welcome at many a table today when the US celebrates Thanksgiving.
But when Victor graces a dinner table, he comes as guest of honor with his feathers puffed up rather than as the main course with his innards stuffed, which is the way about 46 million turkeys are expected to end up this Thanksgiving, according to the National Turkey Federation.
Victor will never be one of them. He is one of a growing number of turkeys that are living out their days at animal sanctuaries after being rescued from slaughterhouses and cages around the US.
PHOTO: AFP
Some are saved by the US president in a tradition — pardoning the Thanksgiving Day turkey — that dates back to John F. Kennedy.
The turkey who will be pardoned by US President Barack Obama this year will live out his days at the Virginia estate of the US’ founding president, George Washington.
Victor owes a debt of gratitude not to the US president but to the growing number of vegetarians and vegans in the country.
Victor was found four years ago on Thanksgiving Day, walking down a road in the Washington suburb of Germantown.
He was just several months old — turkeys who are destined for the dinner table usually end up in a deep-freeze when they are about four months old. Luckily for him, he was found by a couple of vegans, who took him to Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary in Maryland, where this year he celebrated his fourth birthday.
Last weekend, Victor joined the sanctuary’s other turkeys, guinea fowl, Japanese silkies, bantam hens, peacocks, even pigs who might have ended up as honey roasted hams on Thanksgiving, for a dinner thrown for the animals by humans.
On the menu for the birds was corn, grapes, tofu, greens, apples. The pigs got pumpkins while about 800 humans sat at tables under a warm autumn sun and dined on couscous, quinoa, beans, pumpkin soup, pasta and other vegan dishes.
The first time Poplar Spring held its Thanksgiving dinner for the turkeys 12 years ago, 50 people showed up. This year, more than 800 turned out, a fact that could be attributed to the rising popularity of a vegan and vegetarian diet in the US.
“There’s been a steadily increasing number of vegetarians and we have seen a big jump in the proportion of that population who are vegans,” said John Cunningham, the consumer research manager at the Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG).
According to VRG, about 6 million to 8 million US adults out of a total population of about 300 million are vegetarian, and about half of them are vegan.
The main reason people become vegetarian is “because they don’t want to participate in the slaughter of animals,” Cunningham said.
Dining with the likes of Victor and his fellow Poplar Spring residents has pushed some Americans towards vegetarianism, said Terry Cummings, co-founder and director of Poplar Spring.
“Coming here plants a seed in people’s minds: They eat well, they meet the birds and I think a lot of them are surprised at how much like a pet dog a turkey can be,” she said.
“Our white domestic turkey, Opal, was following people, letting them pat her,” Cummings said.
Americans who bond with turkeys can adopt one of the birds to save its life. The turkey will go to live at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York.
Humane humans can also switch to a vegan alternative to turkey for Thanksgiving. Called Tofurky, it has been available since the mid-1990s. While US turkey production has doubled since 1970 to meet greater consumer demand, Tofurky production has increased more than 600-fold since 1995, the year Seth Tibbott created the vegan alternative to turkey.
Last year, 340,000 Tofurkys were sold in the US and sales in the first 11 months of this year were 6 percent higher than for the whole of last year. But turkeys shouldn’t rest on their laurels. Americans remain the biggest eaters of turkey in the world, consuming 7.7kg of the meat a year — the equivalent of a third of Victor.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
SUPERFAN: The Japanese PM played keyboard in a Deep Purple tribute band in middle school and then switched to drums at university, she told the British rock band Legendary British rock band Deep Purple yesterday made Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s day with a brief visit to their high-profile superfan as they returned to the nation they first toured more than half a century ago. Takaichi’s reputation as an amateur drummer, and a fan of hard rock and heavy metal has been well documented, and she has referred to Deep Purple as one of her favorite bands along with the likes of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. “You are my god,” a giddy Takaichi said in English to Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice, presenting him with a set of made-in-Japan
RSS