Help Turkeys This Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is approaching, and we can feel it in our feathers! What does that mean for kids like you? It means you get to be with your family inside a nice, warm home, where the delicious smells of food cooking fill the air all day. You probably get an extra long weekend off from school too — how exciting!

Turkeys don't have holiday homework to worry about like you might, but they do have their own reason to be nervous: what’s on the menu for Thanksgiving. We think turkeys, just like all animals at Farm Sanctuary, are too neat to eat. They are sweet and gentle, and they want to live out their lives in peace.

Learn a little bit more about your feathered friends on the farm and how you can help them.

Fun Facts about Turkeys

* Turkeys recognize each other by their unique voices.
* Male  turkeys are called toms or gobblers and females are called hens
* Wild turkeys can make up to 20 different sounds.
* Turkeys communicate with each other by changing the color of their necks, faces and snoods. A snood is the flap of skin just above their beaks. If a tom turkey’s snood is bright red, it means that he is excited or mad. Females have snoods too, but they are much smaller and don’t have the same bright coloring.
* Grownup turkeys can have between 3,000 and 5,000 feathers.
* Male turkeys, toms, grow a long black beard from their chests and as they get older the beard gets really long.
* Wild turkeys usually have brown feathers over most of their bodies, and the feathers of male wild turkeys can look green, purple, red or gold when the sunlight hits them. Turkeys on factory farms usually have all white feathers.
* A wingspan is how far a bird’s wings can stretch. For turkeys, it is usually between 4 and 5 feet.
* Baby turkeys (poults) cannot fly for the first two weeks of their lives.
* At night, wild turkeys fly up into trees so they can sleep (roost) on branches.
* Wild turkeys can fly as fast as 55 miles per hour and can run up 18 miles per hour!
* Benjamin Franklin thought our national bird should be the turkey instead of the bald eagle!

Find more turkey facts here.

A Short History of Turkeys
Did you know that turkeys have been living in North America for almost ten million years? In the early 1900s, wild turkeys almost became extinct, because so many of them were killed by hunters. If a species becomes “extinct,” it means that there are no more animals left of that species. Turkeys were in danger not only because of hunting but also because they were loosing their homes to farmers and other humans who wanted the land where they lived. One very old breed of turkey - called the California Turkey - actually went extinct, because it was over-hunted, and because its environment had changed so much.

How to Help Turkeys
Think about how turkeys are treated. Now think about how you like to be treated. Just like you, turkeys want a chance to play, be with friends and family, eat good food, and have a nice home. You can help make sure more turkeys get to have these things. Here are a few ideas on how to help your feathered friends …

1. Talk with your parents about what you'd like to eat for Thanksgiving dinner. Ask them if turkeys can be left off the menu this year

2. Here are some recipes that are 100 percent animal-friendly and delicious. At the next “Show and Tell” in your classroom, or for a school project, bring a photo of a Farm Sanctuary turkey and share with your friends the fun facts you have learned about turkeys.

3. Sponsoring a turkey with your parents’ help and permission is a great way to help an animal at Farm Sanctuary. And you get a cool adoption certificate! It’s a $25 donation, and the money not only helps us feed and care for the turkeys at our shelters, but also helps us protect farm animals everywhere. Lots of people like to display their certificate on the table during Thanksgiving dinner and think about how they helped save a turkey by not eating one.

4. To help pay for your turkey adoption you can try and raise the money. This is called fundraising. Here is a list of ways that you can fundraise.

On behalf of all the turkeys at Farm Sanctuary and everywhere, thank you for caring! Happy holidays!