Tale of 2 Turkeys : The Doomed: The bird got a Ventura County Fair award. Today it takes a new place of honor--on the holiday menu.

Larry Stallings was overjoyed this summer when one of the turkeys he had raised since March took top honors at the Ventura County Fair.

Stallings and his entire family are preparing for another happy event today when they will sit down to eat the bird for their Thanksgiving dinner.

Stallings’ family has never been squeamish about eating the livestock that they have been raising for the last 20 years, although the Ventura College horticulture instructor said his wife and six children have drawn the line at actually slaughtering the animals themselves.

“They all enjoy eating it, as long as I do the dressing,” Stallings said while holding the 25-pound white Holland hen earlier this week at his small ranch in the Ventura foothills.

“My wife, now she’s a city girl, and she won’t have anything to do with that part of it,” Stallings said.

Growing up in rural Arizona, the son of a farmer and the grandson of a Depression-era butcher, Stallings learned at a young age how to prepare food that he raised himself. It is a skill that he has tried to pass on to his children.

Stallings’ daughter Margaret, 28, raised her first poultry as part of a 4-H program in 1977. She admits to having been a bit reluctant to eat the first two chickens she raised.

“The first year none of us kids really wanted to eat it, but my parents told us that was all we were having so I tried it. That was probably my only hesitation,” she said.

That the family eats food they raise themselves “really freaks everyone else out a bit,” Margaret Stallings said, but Larry Stallings has an answer for them.

“Four-H isn’t a pet program, it’s an educational thing,” he said while looking over a wall of ribbons won by other turkeys that the family has grown.

“We raise food animals and we expect the kids to be realistic and understand that’s what they are raising them for.”

None of the animals are ever given names, he added, because “you don’t raise a turkey for a pet. They’re just not that kind of animal.”

When the time came for this year’s turkey to become dinner, Stallings said he would not use an ax to kill it. Slaughtering an animal this way leads to wild muscle reactions in which the turkeys often bruise.

“It’s just an old-fashioned idea, a misconception, that you do it with an ax,” Stallings said, explaining that the preferred method is to hang the bird upside down before cutting its throat. “Slaughtering animals isn’t a tasteful job, and you have to know what you’re doing.”

Stallings, who has raised turkeys for animal shows and the holidays for most of the past 20 years, said the cooked bird is “really no different than if I’d bought it at a store--except for the taste.”

The large turkey processing facilities begin slaughtering and freezing turkeys in April for the holiday season, Stallings said, adding that even poultry bought in a butcher shop might have been slaughtered days before.

“When you kill them and eat them right away it just tastes so much better. It’s just nothing like a frozen turkey.”

Many schoolchildren are uneasy making comparisons between the meat they have for dinner on Thanksgiving and the live turkeys that Stallings and his children have brought to schools over the years.

“The kids are usually very surprised. They make comments like, ‘How could you eat something you’ve known?’ ” Stallings said.

“Or they’ll tell us that it isn’t the same as buying one in the store,” Margaret Stallings said.

Her father added, “That’s when we explain to them that everything we eat--even a McDonald’s hamburger--was once alive.”