(no subject)

[astridv]

I just woke up from a dream in which I'd bought a live turkey to have for dinner, but then lots of other stuff happened and I had to take the turkey with me wherever I went, and we bonded, and in the end I couldn't bring myself to eat him so I kept him as a pet. Woke up wondering what turkeys eat. wtf.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Wild ones eat about the same as pheasants, i.e. mainly insects when they are young, plant stuff like seeds and berries as adults and they dig for roots in winter. Domestic ones are of course fattened with the cheapest commercial options of soybeans and corn.

One thing to say for Tofurkey, there's no chance of bonding happening.

[astridv]

True. ;)

My parents kept chickens for the eggs. For some reasons they had two roosters at one point, which proved too much stress for the hens, so they had a neighbouring farmer come over to butcher one of the roosters. My mom told me she made a lovely fricassée. So, she and my stepdad were sitting at the dinner table, crying in their fricassee, and couldn't bring themselves to eat a single bite. The had to give the entire meal to the dog.

All the other chickens got to live out their lives until they died of natural causes.

I think I'd have to be starving (in the literal sense) to eat an animal I've known before.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, two roosters doesn't work. My brother keeps a couple of dwarf chickens (those are allowed as pets even in cities, but they lay eggs too, and actually are the size you imagine regular chickens to be when you mostly see the carcasses of young ones in the supermarket, which I now guess aren't fully grown before they get eaten), anyway he allowed his to hatch a couple of their eggs and one turned out male. Once he reached adolesence there was no end to the conflict and stress and it was affecting the hens, stressing them with all this conflict in the flock, so he had to go.

But nobody he knew among chicken owners wanted a young rooster for anything but eating, and the only other option was just having him euthanized, which seemed even worse and wasteful. So the young rooster ended up given away and butchered despite having had a name. He wasn't eaten by my brother though, because he and his family are vegetarians, and he lied to his kids and told them that the hawk had gotten him (one of the otjer chicks earlier fell victim to it, so that was a familiar explanation for a chicken finding a natural end).

[jae]

American Thanksgiving has corrupted your subconscious!

-J

[astridv]

Maybe! I have no idea where else that could've come from. And it was intermingled with some action-heavy sequences that were unrelated to the turkey story. (I've completely forgotten what those were about, but I think it had something to do with Agents of Shield.)