Facts on Fowl : Think You’re Ready to Talk Turkey? Better Sample These Words on the Bird

According to the National Turkey Federation, we’ll consume about 45 million turkeys before the week is out.

Shouldn’t we then know our dinner?

Let’s talk turkey.

* Turkey brains: Domesticated turkeys are bred for their breasts, not for their brains.

Consider this: Some turkeys will stand in the rain with their mouths open until they drown. Others have been known to suffocate themselves while hiding from airplanes. Or shadows of airplanes. Or shadows.

* Turkey geography: Yes, they eat turkey in Turkey (where the bird name comes from, according to some sources), but only at Christmastime.

* Turkey cardiac arrests: According to researchers at Pennsylvania State University, at least 843,000 turkeys die each year of heart attacks from round-heart syndrome.

That’s not counting the healthy turkeys who expire from fright watching the diseased ones die.

“It is not uncommon to go into a bird house and see the afflicted bird lying dead, surrounded by three or four other birds that died because of the hysteria caused,” noted poultry scientist Andrew G. Yersin.

* Turkeys in space: The first meal eaten on the moon was roast turkey.

* Turkey assaults: In 1990, an Oklahoma man, enraged that his Thanksgiving turkey was not defrosted, was charged with assaulting his wife with the frozen bird.

She was not seriously injured, but did change the menu.

* Turkey bowling: Invented late one night in 1989 by a Lucky stock clerk in Orange County, the sport of flinging frozen turkeys at plastic two-liter soda bottles was touted as the sport for the ‘90s.

It wasn’t.

The Santa Ana man, who was eventually fired from his job, was wrong on another count: His plans to organize the Poultry Bowling Assn. never got off the ground.

* Turkey fitness: Forget it.

In their brief lives--hens live about 16 weeks, toms about 19 weeks--some turkeys never leave their environmentally controlled houses.

Each bird gets about two square feet of personal space and puts on about a pound a week until they are so fat they can barely move.

Bon appetit!