This Gobbler Rules the Roost : Holiday: Love means never having to cook your 50-pound pet turkey. Even though his name <i> is</i> Dinner.

How to begin this tale of a tyke and his turkey?

We’ll start with “Dinner.” Not the meal, but the turkey that has grown to almost 50 pounds in the seven months he has been in the care of one David Garcia Jr., 4 years old (scarcely 35 pounds himself), and his older (and heavier) sisters.

“The thing is still growing,” said a dumbfounded David Garcia Sr. He was referring to the turkey, which he bought from a rural pet shop in Sun Valley. While driving his delivery truck, he had spotted ducklings and chicks at the store and thought, “Wouldn’t it be a nice Easter time treat to show the kids and maybe get them a chick.”

The subsequent visit, he recalled, went something like this:

“OK kids, what do you want? Duck chicks?” he asked.

“A turkey chick!” exclaimed David Jr.

At this point in the story, he lowers his voice a bit so the children won’t hear the ulterior motive that made him quickly give in to the pleas of his little boy.

“I thought, ‘Yeah, a turkey.’ I was going to fatten it up. You know, fresh turkey! No preservatives. No additives. Fresh turkey. How could you beat that?”

David Sr. does not regularly get excited about killing fowl, but he grew up on a farm in Hawthorne when Hawthorne had farms--in fact he clings to that era by populating his back yard with four rabbits, three turtles, a rooster, and a couple of snakes. So forgive the glint in his eyes when he envisioned fresh fowl.

But he overlooked one thing: the powerful bond of children and animals.

“We even called it ‘Dinner’ because that’s what I was going to do to it,” he said, with just a trace of regret in his voice.

“No, Dad, no,” screamed daughter Naomi, 8. “You said we wouldn’t do that!”

“I know we are not going to eat it now,” he assured her, “but that’s what I was thinking.”

So Dinner lives. But it’s a wonder.

For one thing, he shares the back yard of the Garcias’ Gardena home with a playful pup named Poncho who just happens to be a pit bull.

Dinner, it turns out, rules the roost. He even pilfers Poncho’s protein-packed puppy food, something that Garcia guesses led to the turkey’s healthy growth.

“He’s better than a dog,” said Maria Garcia, 10. “He doesn’t jump on you. He doesn’t lick you. He doesn’t step on your foot and kick you.”

And then there’s young David, who occasionally hops on Dinner for a ride, to the chagrin of his parents.

But aside from a family pet, Dinner has made the rounds at 135th Street Elementary School, where David is in pre-kindergarten. Dinner made an appearance last Tuesday--”It was almost a riot,” David’s father said--and will be back Monday. Many of the pupils had never seen a real live turkey, said Principal Helen Huang.

“Kids living in the inner city really don’t know what a turkey looks like except in books,” Huang said. “The size of it is just hard to believe.”

So how does young David feel about all this?

“I don’t know,” he said.

Is Dinner fun to be around?

(David sticks his fingers in his ears).

David Sr.:”David, make the turkey talk.”

David Jr.: “Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

Dinner: “Gobble. “