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By Caroline Abels
| Domesticated turkeys live for only four or five months before they end up on our Thanksgiving tables. But the quality of those short lives depends on where they lived: in a factory farm or on a real farm. Vermont is home to many small and mid-sized turkey farms where birds are raised humanely. Here’s a snapshot of one of them: Sleeping Dog Farm in Whitingham, 25 miles southwest of Brattleboro. |  |
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Every July, Justin & Jennifer McNary purchase turkey poults for $4.50 a piece and place the tiny birds in the brooding house pictured here. They put marbles in the grain to encourage the turkeys to feed, since turkeys are attracted to shiny objects. They also place a heat lamp over the birds. Without feathers, young turkeys risk dying of cold, so the McNarys initially keep the heat at 95 degrees, then reduce it by five degrees a week until the birds have “feathered out.” In the brooding house, the turkeys snuggle to keep warm, and their peeping can be mistaken for that of songbirds. |
| After four to six weeks in the brooding house, the turkeys are turned out to summer pastures where they can peck at grass and eat weeds, worms and bugs. This ability to peck and roam is not enjoyed by their brethren in factory farms. Turkeys raised industrially are confined to cramped cages—birds tend to have only two to four square feet to move around in—and because the frustration of confinement leads them to attack each other, their beaks are often cut off by factory employees. “If you’re paying any attention at all to the morality of how you live, then the question of whether you’re going to eat animals farmed under the industrial method is an important one,” Justin says. |  |
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In 2005, the McNarys slaughtered their turkeys themselves on their property. Jennifer remembers how cold it was in the unheated building, how they stood for hours on the cement floor, and how their hands were nearly numb from holding the soaking wet turkeys upside down. This year, to save time, they will send their 60 birds to a slaughterhouse east of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. “Every time our animals leave for the slaughterhouse it’s hard emotionally—it always is,” Jennifer says. “But as Justin told me once, when it’s not hard anymore we shouldn’t be doing it.” |
| Justin’s seven-year-old nephew visited the farm recently. When pork shoulder was served for dinner one night, the boy turned up his nose and refused to eat it. “I said to him, ‘You know, that was my favorite pig,’” Justin recalls. “And he said, ‘Then why did you kill it?’ I said, ‘We raise meat here to be killed, but we don’t dishonor it by throwing it in the garbage.’ The kid got it pretty quickly.” The McNarys say a number of their customers buy from Sleeping Dog Farm because they know the animals are treated well. Others buy the meat just because it tastes good. In fact, customers are sometimes so pleased that they send the McNarys a photograph of their cooked Thanksgiving bird. |  |
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This year, Sleeping Dog Farm is also home to 21 pigs, 50 broiler chickens, and 23 Scotch Highland cattle. The cattle are raised for their meat and have unusual shaggy manes and broad noses. When folks started seeing the McNarys’ Scotch Highlands, they’d say, “What are you raising those hot-shot cattle for?” But the breed is easy to care for and docile. One of the McNarys’ steers once made the papers when he escaped from a local slaughterhouse that had burned down. He meandered through the countryside for three months before being captured. |
Sleeping Dog Farm 802-368-2277 or go to www.sleepingdogfarm.com
Caroline Abels is editor of Vermont’s Local Banquet. She is an independent writer and editor, and a recent graduate of the Environmental Advocacy & Organizing Program at
Antioch University New England in Keene, N.H.
Photos by Barbi Schreiber & Meg Lucas
