Today's Domestic Turkeys Are Genetically Distinct from Wild Ancestors

ScienceDaily (Nov. 19, 2012) — No Thanksgiving dinner is complete without a succulent roasted turkey. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that consumers cook and eat more than 45 million turkeys every Thanksgiving. Very few Americans, however, know much about the difference between their gravy-smothered poultry and the poultry that earlier generations of Americans ate to celebrate the holiday.

"Ancient turkeys weren't your Butterball," said Rob Fleischer, head of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute's Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics. "We set out to compare the genetic diversity of the domestic turkeys we eat today with that of the ancestral wild turkey from South Mexico. Some of what we found surprised us."

What an SCBI scientist and collaborators found was that the domestic turkey that ends up on the dinner table exhibits less genetic variation than not only its ancestral wild counterparts, which were first domesticated in 800 B.C., but also than other livestock breeds, such as domestic pigs or chickens. The genetic traits affected by the variation are body size and breast muscle development -- features that can help determine the likelihood of a consumer buying a turkey. The results of the study were recently published in BMC Genomics.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121119171259.htm

A lucky break for one turkey – a 21st Century escape from ritual slaughter

A few days ago, in a nice bit of holiday timing, a young male wild turkey was brought in from Staten Island. One leg was fractured, and bone splinters had pierced his skin. “It’s very possible he was a casualty of Sandy,” Ms.  McMahon said in an e-mail.

The turkey, who weighs more than eight pounds and has a five-foot wingspan, “makes quite a fuss when you do anything to him,” Ms. McMahon wrote. He is scarfing down seeds and mealworms, and starting to stand on the bad leg.

The wound has to be redressed daily. But the turkey patient is, apparently, no fool. “The strange and wonderful thing,” Ms. McMahon wrote, “is that the bird lays quietly for his splint change.”

Continued:  http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/a-place-to-mend-a-broken-wing/

PETA to Obama: Turkey pardon ceremony is for the birds

In what has become a Thanksgiving tradition, the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals is asking for an end to a Thanksgiving tradition.

On Tuesday, PETA sent a letter to President Obama asking him to skip the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon, a tradition that dates back to Abraham Lincoln. The letter sent by PETA president Ingrid Newkirk said the ceremony “makes light of the mass slaughter of some 46 million gentle, intelligent birds” and “portrays the United States president as being in some sort of business partnership with the turkey-killing industry.”

“We usually ask for other things, but this is the first time we have asked (the president) to give the ceremony a rest,’’ Newkirk told TODAY.com. “I think it’s just been building. The time has come. It’s hard to find anybody who supports the idea of factory farming, and there have been so many reports this year of the environmental effects of factory farming. To have a president who is supposed to be progressive standing there with an industry representative of factory farming knowing about these environmental issues, it’s not very green to welcome him to the White House and endorse factory farms.’’

Continued:  http://holidayblog.today.com/_news/2012/11/20/15312994-peta-to-obama-turkey-pardon-ceremony-is-for-the-birds?lite