I started this piece after seeing a video of thousands of farmed turkeys being suffocated alive by an enormous, slow-moving cloud of foam because they had gotten sick with bird flu and were no longer profitable. In the video, the birds frantically look around at one another, frightened, confused, trying to escape before inevitably getting swept under.

“Foam depopulation” is one of the most common ways flocks of birds are killed when avian influenza outbreaks happen on factory farms. “Depopulation” is a really funny way to say killing.

I do not think many people realize this is happening everywhere, all the time. I also do not think many people realize that this method of killing is not any more gruesome or upsetting than business as usual on factory farms.

On a good day, the birds are hung upside down alive and dragged through electrified baths to stun them. Then their throats are slit and they’re dumped into boiling water to have their feathers removed. Sometimes they’re still alive when they’re dumped into boiling water, because the previous steps are fast-moving and imprecise. Long before they meet their end the birds are mutilated, their beaks cut so they can’t peck, their wings trimmed so they can’t fly, their toes amputated so they can’t scratch.

Thanks to the way we have engineered them over time, they grow so quickly that their joints and bones often collapse on them. They are kept in filthy, crowded enclosures where they never see the sun and are instead surrounded by their own feces and their dead or injured kin. The females are forced to reproduce in a violating cycle of repeated artificial insemination.

Approximately 99.8% of turkeys in the US come from factory farms ¹ where many of these things are happening. This is the story of the turkeys that make it to our plates at our holiday dinners where we preach about gratitude and love and peace and respect.

We have the audacity to make the turkey an autumnal Thanksgiving icon, as if we are somehow respecting the turkeys when we do these things to them. We have kids paint and draw them in school. They are depicted as smiling or jolly or silly almost everywhere you look, even though in real life, they are abused, mutilated, and deprived of everything it means to be a living being. Disturbing. Dishonest.

In the wild, turkeys are smart enough to distinguish members of their family or social group from outsiders. They can even recognize and remember individual human faces and voices. Mothers spend months raising their babies and teaching them how to exist. Siblings will stay together for life. They like to run, fly, forage, and roost together at the end of a long day. They like being cuddled and will make purring, chirping noises when they’re feeling happy.

There is so much to say about factory farming. It is a tremendous public health issue (see: bird flu), a labor and exploitation issue, a social justice issue, and one of the biggest drivers of climate change. Researching any one of these angles will yield a whole new list of atrocities and interconnections. From every angle, it is truly evil.

This art pays tribute to the more than 200 million turkeys who are killed every year in the US. I wanted to draw a turkey who gets to be strong, dignified, and empowered. A departure from that ridiculous turkey hand print art that we all had to do as kids in school.

Every time we buy food, we get to choose whether to fund cruelty and suffering. We get to choose whether we will pay corporations to abuse animals for our consumption.

What will your choice be?

1: Sentience Institute – US Factory Farming Estimates
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates