Backyard Gobblers Can Give Thanks to Devoted Couple

It takes a special kind of person to see the beauty in a turkey. Those beady eyes. That spongy, pendulous flesh. That sharp beak.

To Carol Penun, turkeys are lovely. On Thanksgiving Day she often wonders: After looking into that gentle face, how could anyone ever eat them?

Penun and her husband Victor love to talk turkey.

Tess, a plumped-up fowl, struts around her suburban Camarillo backyard, unaware that in another situation she might be dinner this afternoon. Jake snacks on tiny corn kernels and puffs up to please the ladies. The whole chorus of six birds bounces and gobbles, in a glorious cacophony of turkey music.

These birds will never see the inside of an oven. Truly, this must be turkey paradise.

Tess, fat enough to eat, is the couple’s newest refugee, passed off from a neighbor who needed a home for the fowl. The rest are merely pets, purchased through poultry magazines and given a life in which they can roam free, amid a menagerie of other birds--far from the farms where other turkeys spend their short lives breast to breast.

“They’ve got the life of Riley,” agrees Vic, who is mainly along for the ride. It’s Carol who is the true turkey lover.

The Penuns moved to the Camarillo area about 14 years ago after they were chased out of Thousand Oaks by a homeowners association that didn’t take too kindly to their goose, Corky. So they moved to unincorporated Camarillo, where the neighbors don’t mind their 52 geese, ducks, rheas, chickens--and their gobbling turkeys.

Though retired, the Penuns take no vacations. Where would their lovable fowl be without them? They make three trips a week to the feed store. They spend four hours a day cleaning up after them.

Carol Penun says her turkeys are smart. They are gentle. Her turkeys are affectionate, in their own way.

They respond to their names. They know Carol and Vic. They are ready when feeding time comes.

“These are like members of the family,” Carol said.

And as such, they even have personalities of sorts. Lanky, the patriarch, is laid-back, a gentleman with the ladies. Jake is more of a Lothario, constantly preening in a swelled-up show of white-feather macho. And did Carol mention they were smart?

“If they’re stuffed in community pens, they won’t get individual intelligence,” she said, decrying the typical turkey’s lot in life. “They’re just products for consumption.”

Commercial turkeys aren’t bred for intellect. They are not bred to breed. They are bred for good old-fashioned eating.

“They’re raised to be used by humans,” said Ed Cogger, a professor of veterinary science at Cal Poly Pomona. “They’re bred for presentation and a huge breast.”

And as a result, the breasts of a farm turkey are so large they interfere with mating--instead, such birds must be artificially inseminated.

Vic and Carol Penun think that is terrible. They lost a commercial turkey that had been saved from an overturned turkey truck--when its girth became too much for its tiny bones and legs. Commercial turkeys, even if they aren’t eaten, don’t have much chance in this world.

Their Jake had health problems, too. So they took him to the Conejo Valley Veterinary Clinic for the first snood-ectomy ever performed there. The spongy strip which hangs over the bird’s beak was full of tumors, so the Penuns paid $350 to have it removed.

“We don’t have many people bring in pet turkeys,” said Dr. Sean McCormack, who performed the surgery. “They tend to make very reluctant patients. When 20 pounds of bird flaps its wings, it can hurt.”

But, Jake came through the operation just fine. And he will continue in his blissful ignorance, as the Penuns, and the rest of the world, dig into their holiday feasts today.

So, what will be on the Penuns’ Thanksgiving table?

Cornish game hens. You expected something else?