A Long Island-based animal advocacy group, Humane Long Island, “rescued” two turkeys from being slaughtered to promote a vegan Thanksgiving.
According to John Di Leonardo, president of Human Long Island, the two turkeys were freed from a New York City live slaughter market, “continuing an annual tradition of trading vegan roasts for live birds during the holiday season.”
The group plans to rescue at least one more turkey from another live slaughter market on Tuesday.
“The turkeys will be evaluated by our friends at North Fork Animal Hospital in Southold tomorrow before being adopted by vegan animal sanctuaries J + J Farms Sanctuary in PA and Freedom Farm Sanctuary in NJ, who’ve adopted other turkeys rescued by Humane Long Island at Thanksgiving in years’ past,” Di Leonardo said.
Di Leonardo has long advocated for and is a big fan of the wattled fowl.
“Turkeys are gentle and intelligent animals who, like dogs, enjoy having their bellies rubbed and light up when their favorite person is in the room,” Di Leonardo said. “Like us, they appreciate music, with which they’ll often loudly sing along. In nature, they’ll fly 55 miles an hour, run 35 miles an hour, and live up to 10 years.”
But, he maintained, the 46 million turkeys he said would be killed for Thanksgiving this year in the US “never knew that life. Like chickens, turkeys raised and killed in the United States have no federal legal protection. On factory farms, they’re kept in cramped and filthy sheds by the thousands and killed when they’re still babies: only 3 to 5 months old. Driven psychotic by their harsh realities, they self-mutilate and are driven to cannibalism.”
Some farmers, he said, “resort to severing, without painkillers, the ends of their toes, their snoods, the long protuberance on their faces they use to show affection for one another, and even the ends of their beaks, which are filled with nerve endings, and they use like we use our fingers, to minimize the harm they can do to their product.”
The two turkeys saved are 3-month old babies, still peeping, who’ve already had the ends of their toes and beaks severed; both have staph infections and extensive feather loss, he said. He added that one is unable to walk and the other has open wounds along the entirety of her back, “a victim of cannibalism due to the overcrowded and filthy conditions she was forced to grow up in. Despite all this, these sweet girls are still somehow the lucky ones,” De Leonardo said.
He urged the public to “show a little mercy by tucking into savory, satisfying vegan roasts that give everyone something to be thankful for!”
Humane Long Island, he added, “is making having a cruelty-free Thanksgiving easy” by distributing 1,000 servings of plant-based roasts at Community Solidarity’s food shares all across Long Island and in New York City. Humane Long Island is also distributing a dozen roasts to the Evelyn Alexander Wildlife Rescue Center of the Hamptons “to thank them for rescuing turkeys all year long,” Di Leonardo said. “You, too, can save nearly 200 animals every year by simply leaving them off your plate.”
