At Three Peas Farm, the animals have transcended “free range.” The turkeys in particular know no bounds—they lounge on the farmhouse’s brand new wraparound porch, the kid’s jungle gym, and the driver’s seat of your car if you leave the doors open and unattended (they also like it if you leave the keys in the ignition with a full tank of gas). They sleep on the roof and peck the farmer’s window at dawn demanding breakfast. The farmers’ five-year-old son named them Holler and Abilene, Snoopy and Burger, as they took turns getting hugs on his lap. They were our pets, and on Saturday, October 17th, we slaughtered and froze them.
Owner, farmer, and turkey mama Amy holding Abilene
I decided to live my cottagecore gap year on Eric and Amy’s pint-sized organic farm in rural Washington. While I didn’t move here to farm (I’m one of the many tenants renting a room while serving an AmeriCorps term), living amongst the vegetable patches and roving chickens, turkeys, ducks, and rabbits was an opportunity to understand the gritty work that fills our supermarket shelves. With Thanksgiving’s main course squawking around the property, the part of agriculture we’d most like to forget suddenly became, quite literally, my own backyard.
I was eager to help, and not just because a turkey pecked me in the crotch during an important ZOOM meeting the week before. I’ve been struggling to justify eating meat for years, balancing its obvious moral and environmental shortcomings with its irresistible taste and abundant protein. Red meat was off my menu because of its carbon footprint, but I still ate a turkey sandwich every day for lunch. This could be the decisive battle of my dietary war: was I willing to kill an animal, to spill real blood, just to sate my palate?
We started at lunchtime on a grey Saturday. The sounds of the farm—turkey gobbles and kindergartner shrieks and dog barks—were absent in the minutes before the first kill. It was just the wind and our few words of preparation. My housemates had set up a white pop-up tent with three white folding tables: one with big coolers to hold the birds, one with hot water and bleach to prepare our knives, and one to disembowel and clean. There was also a plucker and a partitioned area containing the kill cone (yes, the kill cone) where the actual slaughter would occur.
Three Peas Farm
Eric went in search of a bird. Until the moment he scooped it up in a towel and brought it to the cone, it was an average day in its turkey life, comprised of walking around, picking its last bit of food, getting one last turd on the porch. With difficulty, he got the turkey upside down in the cone (which is basically a bullhorn on a post), where, while whispering and stroking its head, he waited for its twitching to stop as it lulled into unconsciousness. Then Eric, the only vegetarian of our group, stabbed a pithing stick through its jugular and into the brainstem. After a disquieting pause, the bird began bucking its wings and legs in its autonomic nervous system’s last bid at life.
“With Thanksgiving’s main course squawking around the property, the part of agriculture we’d most like to forget suddenly became, quite literally, my own backyard.”
The turkey was dead, but it wasn’t close to being food. We put it through the plucker, a big metal cauldron lined with rubber rods, that, when the floor spun, whipped the bird against the walls to knock the feathers loose. I’d always imagined that a plucker, well, plucked the bird with care and precision. This was more like a shakedown, with limbs flailing around pell-mell as the feathers were ripped off. Eric used pruning shears to cut off their dragon-scale legs and placed the pink body on the bleached white folding table—my station.
To be technical, what came next was the evisceration of the bird. To spare you any more gruesome details (I know, a little too late, right?) I’ll give you the short version. We threw its guts and organs and sacs of goop into five gallon buckets, washed it with a hose to remove the blood, and lifted its wings to tweezer out any last feathers. Its flesh wasn’t yet cold when we put it in the cooler.
While we worked, chickens and turkeys sauntered about our feet. Some tried to drink the wastewater from the plucker. A few chickens investigated the bloody canopic buckets. Two even decided our makeshift morgue was the perfect place to get it on. I still haven’t decided if I was more comforted by the animals’ casual approach to death or worried at their interest in cannibalism.
This is the part where I tell you I was horrified by the carnage and haven’t eaten the flesh of our feathered friends since. Unfortunately, that would be a lie. I still have my daily turkey sandwich; I sear up juicy, spiced chicken breasts for quesadillas and pitas; and come Thanksgiving, when Snoopy’s on the table, I’m digging in.
Abilene (left) and Holler (right) were pardoned by the farm’s five-year-old. The couple enjoys their retirement lording over the smaller birds
Frankly, it bothers me that the process didn’t bother me more. In some ways, I actually felt better about eating meat—at least if the animals are raised like ours. Rotating its hip to pull out one last feather was proof that meat wasn’t corn syrup and horse toenails and glue squeezed into a tube (at least our meat wasn’t). Thighs, drumsticks, tenders all corresponded to the anatomy of a real creature. Somehow, the farm-to-table movement of the past decades has made me care more that my food is natural than if it’s ethical.
Of course, there is no better life for a turkey than on Three Peas Farm (putting aside the terror that must come from an overexcited five year-old), but their ultimate purpose is the same. I think I can accept that truth, knowing they have one really bad day in an otherwise enviable life. Deep down, though, I know it's a fallacy to extend that to what I buy in the supermarket. We sold our turkeys for $5/lb, meaning a good sized bird was nearly $100. That’s the cost to do it right. At my local Safeway, the right set of coupons fills your thanksgiving table for 50¢/lb. That prices a similar bird at barely ten bucks. Ten dollars swapped for five months of an animal’s existence. Imagining what agricultural horrors make life that cheap makes me queasy.
“Frankly, it bothers me that the process didn’t bother me more. In some ways, I actually felt better about eating meat—at least if the animals are raised like ours.”
I love a good deal (especially while I’m on a full-time volunteer’s salary). However, with meat, eggs, or dairy, odds are that deal comes at a cost ultimately borne by the animal. My experience with poultry processing has transformed “free range” and “grassfed” and “organic” from abstracted slogans into moral signposts. Knowing what I know, I should pony up to buy from a farm like ours or opt for the tofurkey.
Processing meat defined my feelings on animal welfare and continually pushes me to shop accordingly. But buying ethically-raised meat doesn’t absolve me of the larger issue with industrial meat production: its abysmal effects on climate change. Animal rights are just one piece of the larger food industry’s environmental entanglement; a well-cared for chicken can still harm our fragile planet.
I’m building an ethical relationship with meat as a stopgap, hoping that one day I’ll have the willpower and the knowhow to give up animal products entirely. Then, I’ll truly eat by my values. But for now, I’m Sam Bezilla, animal-rights carnivore, aspiring vegetarian, and one day vegan.