Goodbye, Gobbler

The bird was a day old when they met, a soft, dependent little ball of warmth in Tim Belcher’s palm. It was love at first sight.

Which is why when Belcher, 15, recalls his friend today, its 38 1/2 pounds about to be someone’s Thanksgiving dinner, he says it will be hard not to cry.

The object of Belcher’s affection is a turkey, one of 18 raised from chicks by Belcher and 24 other students at Buena Park High School. Like most turkeys, the birds were raised to be fattened and killed. The students, all members of a veterinary science class and the local chapter of Future Farmers of America, knew the deal from the beginning.

But that didn’t make it easier to say goodbye.

“I knew that I was getting him to kill, but I just started to fall in love with him,” said Belcher of the bird he named Gobbler. As Belcher spoke, he stroked the bird’s feathers, patted its violet-colored head and looked into its beady black eyes.

The next day would be Gobbler’s last.

“I’m probably not going to see him again,” Belcher said of the bird on its way to be slaughtered. “Just for the record, he’s never bitten anyone. He’s the nicest turkey on this farm. I’m going to miss him.”

Since the turkeys came into their lives, the 25 students hardly went a day without thinking about the birds. They took turns feeding them, cleaning their pens and weighing them. They tested them for bacteria and illnesses, separated them when they fought with one another, served them an antibiotic-free mash.

They learned about the growth rate of turkeys (they gain about a quarter pound a week if properly fed), about the difference between free-range and free-roam (their turkeys were free-roam, kept in large pens rather than in a field) and how to pick a turkey up without getting bitten or whacked in the face by a wing. (Grab the bird’s thigh on one side and the wing on the other; holding it around the mid-section inhibits its breathing.)

They learned that turkeys with white feathers are pricier than those with black feathers, because their skin is not covered with black dots from pigment after they’ve been plucked.

And they learned where the phrase “pecking order” comes from. It refers to the tendency of bigger, stronger birds to peck their smaller cousins bloody if kept in the same pen.

Through it all, they learned that a lot more goes into making Thanksgiving dinner than baking yams.

“It taught me what goes on behind the scenes at Thanksgiving,” said Thomas Moore, 16, putting a blue tag on his turkey to identify it at the slaughterhouse.

“Before it was like, OK, there’s food on the table. But now that I know more about it, it helps me understand what I’m eating.”

Of course, not all the students will be enjoying their turkey quite as much today.

“I’m not going to eat turkey this year. I feel bad,” said Rosa Valenzuela, 16, a sophomore in the class. “What if it’s one of my own turkeys here?”

Others were philosophical.

“As long as I don’t see it, it’s all right,” Moore said. “I understand why it has to be done. I mean, they have to be killed, it’s one of those things that has to be done in life.”

Belcher resolved his ethical quandary about killing Gobbler the best way he could. While the other birds raised by the class were sold this week to buyers the students found themselves, Belcher donated his to his mother’s church. It will be part of a Thanksgiving dinner for the homeless.

The rest of the birds are being sold for $1 a pound, not a profit considering the birds cost $2.70 each as chicks and about $40 each to raise.

Teacher Kimberley Smith said she’s determined to have the class at least break even next year. The students will buy the feed in bulk, and raise the turkeys in a pasture behind the school so they can sell them as more pricey “free range” birds.

“This is one of the lessons the kids learn,” said Smith, who this spring came up with the idea of having her class raise the birds.

“‘The thing I tell them to keep in mind is that these turkeys would not have a life if they weren’t being raised for food. What we have here is an industry for human use.”