By Susan Hayhurst

Does eating a turkey for Thanksgiving or the holidays have your gobbler down? Are you fed up with fowl? The Farm Sanctuary animal rescue organization offers an alternative. Celebrate November’s Adopt a Turkey month!

According to its website, since 1986, the vegan-encouraging organization’s Adopt a Turkey project has inspired people to save a turkey at Thanksgiving. The sponsorships help them rescue animals like feathered fowl, find loving homes for the needy creatures, and advocate for fowl and other farm animals everywhere.

The group’s “Celebration of the Turkeys” features a variety of events. Open sanctuary time allows visitors to spend “quality time interacting with … turkeys.” A “Feeding of the Turkeys Ceremony” is all about watching their turkeys indulge in a feast of pumpkin pie without whipped cream and cranberries, and salad without ranch dressing.

Not to be left out, resident pigs receive a special pumpkin feeding. And even the human guests chow down on a Thanksgiving-themed vegan lunch. Ooh-la-la.

Turkey talk
Why revel in the scrawny-necked bird? Most Americans happily go along with serving up the traditional turkey because they think the musket-toting Pilgrims did. There’s no specific historical fact that proves this was so. William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony, in his memoirs mentioned “wild fowl.”

Benjamin Franklin himself denounced the bald eagle as America’s symbol, writing: “I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a bird of bad moral character … the turkey is, in comparison, a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.”

I disagree with turkeys being respectable birds and adopting them or any other fowl. I do expect a presidential pardon for the vast quantity of turkey I will consume at Thanksgiving.

Hayhurst writes from Terre Haute, Ind.