I am not advocating that we eat turkeys alive . . . : Gobble, Gobble, Aghrrrr

I want you to keep in mind today as you settle down to a traditional Thanksgiving feast that the turkey you are about to enjoy was raised under deplorable conditions and died screaming while hanging by its feet.

The hell you say.

Well, that isn’t exactly what I say but it is what is said by an organization called Compassion for Animals, which is using this otherwise festive holiday season to get across the message that today’s dinner did not live a happy and fulfilled life.

Au contraire.

Turkeys, says a spokeshuman for Compassion, are raised in cages that are barely one-foot square, thus severely limiting their sphere of activity and certainly impacting on the quality of their short, stressful existences.

I could argue, I suppose, that the Japanese don’t have much more room than that and they’re out building cars and television sets, but that’s another column for another day.

For those who missed the story, representatives of Compassion for Animals met recently in a Sepulveda backyard with members of the press and four real turkeys to plead with America not to eat bird today.

Eat tofu or eat taro root or eat soybean meatballs, but spare the turkey.

Well now.

As a commentator on animal affairs, I was naturally interested in the Turkey Rights Campaign, but was a little confused about its ultimate purpose.

Does Compassion for Animals want us to stop eating turkeys completely or to simply raise the birds in roomy turkey condos before lopping off their bald heads?

One step at a time, says Maida Henderson, the organization’s associate director.

“It would be lovely if everyone were a vegetarian, but that’s not going to happen overnight,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’m sure most people don’t want turkeys to suffer. We’ll start there.”

Food animals are generally raised under miserable circumstances, pumped full of chemicals, fattened quickly and rushed off to slaughter in an assembly line fashion, Maida says. Her imagery is compelling if not tasteful.

“Half the animals we eat are vegetarians,” she told me. “ We’re the predators, not them.”

I meant to ask if personally killing and then eating grizzly bears and white sharks would be any better but I forgot.

I did, however, request her comment on the sparsely held theory that vegetables also scream their lives away when picked for, say, a tossed salad or a creamed-carrot side dish. Maida frets over that too.

“I have trepidations about trees having their limbs cut,” she said, “but I must say that plants have no central nervous system, not like turkeys. Turkeys are living, feeling, warm-blooded organisms.”

Another Compassion member asked at the press conference that the reporters observe the “sparkling eyes and gentle ways” of the four turkeys in attendance, who obligingly gobbled in pert response.

One presumes the reporters did, indeed, look into the birds’ sparkling eyes, but I was not among them. The only turkeys I have observed with an interest at all have, alas, been headless and baked to a golden brown.

Those who advocate better treatment for turkeys maintain that God did not put animals on Earth to be eaten, a position held by many of my neighbors in Topanga Canyon, where life is lived on the blurry edge.

Then why, I hear you cry, did God give us Meleagris gallopavo? To beautify the world? Hardly. To be our friends? Not mine.

I maintain, perhaps boorishly so, that the turkey evolved into what it is for precisely the purpose it is being used, which is to say a starring role on Thanksgiving day.

I am not, however, without feeling for living creatures.

When the Compassion people point out that turkeys are decapitated by a circle saw while hanging upside down, and then ask, “How would you like that?” I would have to reply that I wouldn’t like that at all.

I am not advocating that we eat turkeys alive, however. I am simply joining with those who believe that the bird deserves better treatment prior to its final mission.

May I suggest, therefore, a kind of Grand Turkey Hotel or a Club Medturkey existence for the little dears to brighten their last days and make palatable the fate that lies in store for them?

A little wine, a little music?

The only other alternative to having our turkey and eating it too would be to create a new breed of animal acceptable to carnivore and herbivore alike.

I have a modest suggestion.

Cross an ugly bird with a rice plant to create a prestuffed vegetable turkey with no central nervous system, thus eliminating whatever guilt feelings might exist at holiday chow time.

I can see by your eyes, however, that you weary of turkey rights, so I bid you drink sparingly, eat well, have fun and my sympathies to your late dinner.

Requiescat in pace, turkey.