the birds and the bees 89rage, this water drinking, as all the poults tried dipping and stretching like
yodelers, now urgently pecking at any shiny thing, including my wrist-
watch.
From time to time one of the babies would be overtaken by the urge
for a power nap. Staggering like a drunk under the warm glow of the
brooder lamp, it would shut its eyes and keel over, feet and tiny winglets
sprawled out flat. More siblings keeled onto the pile, while others climbed
over the fuzzy tumble in a frantic race to nowhere.
It’s a good thing they don’t stay this adorable forever. I’d raised turkeys
before, with the cuteness factor being a huge worry at the start. When
they imprinted on me as Mama and rushed happily to greet me whenever
I appeared, I just felt that much more like Cruella De Vil. Inevitably,
though, all adorable toddlers turn into something else. These babies
would lose their fluff to a stiff adult plumage, and by Thanksgiving they’d
just be beasts—in the case of the toms, testosterone- driven beasts that
swagger and charge blindly at anything that might be a live female turkey
(i.e., anything that moves). As time took its course, turkey nature itself
would nudge us toward the task of moving them from barnyard to the
deep freeze. This one little shoebox of fluff, plus grain, grass, and time,
would add up to some two hundred pounds of our year’s food supply.
I can’t claim I felt emotionally neutral as I took these creatures in my
hands, my fingers registering downy softness and a vulnerable heartbeat.
I felt maternal, while at the same time looking straight down the pipe to-
ward the purpose of this enterprise. These babies were not pets. I know
this is a controversial point, but in our family we’d decided if we meant to
eat anything, meat included, we’d be more responsible tenants of our food
chain if we could participate in the steps that bring it to the table. We al-
ready knew a lot of dying went into our living: the animals, the plants in
our garden, the beetles we pull off our bean vines and crunch underfoot,
the weeds we rip from the potato hills. Plants have the karmic advantage
of creating their own food out of pure air and sunlight, whereas we ani-
mals, lacking green chlorophyll in our skin, must eat some formerly living
things every single day. You can leave the killing to others and pretend it
never happened, or you can look it in the eye and know it. I would never
presume to make that call for anyone else, but for ourselves we’d settled