Her Face Is Half Gone! Why Baby Turkeys Are Starving On The President's Farm

My god, what happened to her face?

Its the middle of the night, and Im with a team of activists from the Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) Open Rescue Network on the White Houses turkey farm. And were all in shock at what were seeing. The top half of the little birds face is flattened, as if pounded in with a sledge hammer. Her beak, which birds use the way we use our hands, is a shriveled stump covered in scars.

How has she survived? I whisper. Can she even eat?

She is a midget, just one fourth the size of the other birds. Her slow movements show the toll of malnutrition. This baby bird is starving to death. And its all happening at a free range Whole Foods turkey farm .

Disturbed by what youve read? Sign the petition asking President Obama to pardon all the White House turkeys!

Mass mutilation and starvation are the dark secrets of our Thanksgiving turkey. And these practices occur, not just at Walmart or Costco, but at Jaindl Farms, supplier to the White House and Whole Foods. President Obama has sung Jaindls praises . Whole Foods touts Jaindls turkeys as free range and global animal partnership certified. Even major animal welfare organizations have been duped into applauding Jaindls supposed commitment to animal welfare .

But heres the truth.

Every baby turkey born at Jaindl is greeted into this Earth the same way, by burning her face. The industry must do this because the alternative is even worse: birds with intact beaks tearing each other to pieces as they go insane from confinement. (Even on so-called free-range farms, 25 pound birds typically get less than 2.5 square feet of space each , about the size of a small floor mat.) Around ten percent of the birds die before they reach slaughter, often starving to death because they are in too much pain from debeaking. But, to the industry, this is better than losing 100% from the birds cannibalizing one another. Indeed, death from starvation is so common that the industry has a term for it : starveout.

How is this possible at a supposedly humane farm? Quite simply, because no one bothers to check that anything the industry says is true.

This is partly a self-inflicted injury. Influenced by corporate grants from giants such as Whole Foods, animal advocates have moved towards self-regulation -- i.e. voluntary corporate commitments to implement more humane practices, such as cage-free eggs -- despite compelling evidence that, well, self-regulation doesnt work. To the contrary, from finance to coffee , corporations have used self-regulation as a tool to ward off real regulation and co-opt progressive movements. Weve got the problem solved, the CEOs say. No need for you to worry any longer. But with no accountability, progress is just an illusion. A prior DxE open rescue found that a certified humane Costco farm was, in fact, filled with rotting animals and cannibalism . And deceptive humane marketing has been accompanied by the largest increases in per capita meat consumption in 40 years .

Fraud in animal welfare is also a failure of government. Voters do not want animals tortured, or to be deceived when they are shopping. Yet the rules of the game have been set up to ensure those outcomes. Turkeys, for example, are not even considered animals under federal animal cruelty law. (One wonders how USDA officials passed first grade biology.) And the Meat Inspection Act bars consumers from taking action to stop fraud at stores like Whole Foods. (Courts have held that misbranding of meat products is the exclusive domain of the federal USDA, pre-empting other parties, even governmental bodies, from taking action.) Government, in short, is not just asleep at the wheel but complicit in the fraud.

But most of all, the failure of animal welfare is one of our culture. We all look at violence against animals with disgust. And we look at the Thanksgiving turkey feast with joy. Yet those two scenes are flip sides of exactly the same coin. We cannot have one without the other. Only years of socialization under bizarre cultural norms -- norms that abhor violence against animals unless its for dinner -- allow this tension to be ignored.

But a house built on a weak foundation will eventually fall. Philosophers have found that inconsistent moral beliefs are almost always resolved, over the long run, in the direction of truth -- what John Rawls called reflective equilibrium . And as more pressure and attention is placed on animal agriculture, people are reconciling their conflicting beliefs on animals by showing increasing support for animal rights. Indeed, a remarkable 32% of Americans now say that animals should have the same rights as people. That is higher than support for marriage equality just 20 years ago .

A generation from now, then, perhaps activists will no longer have to sneak on farms to save a handful of dying animals from the Presidents turkey farm. Because, as a movement for animal rights grows, and truly effective legal protections (including a constitutional bill of rights for animals ) are passed, all the slaughterhouses in the nation will have disappeared. And our nation will finally have a truly humane Thanksgiving feast -- one where no animals are killed at all.

Want to take action? Sign the petition asking President Obama to cut ties with Jaindl and spare all the White House turkeys!