It’s payback time in turkey town

I had a dream on the night before Thanksgiving that Pamela Anderson was after me.

Her intention was not to ravish me with her charms, but to break my nose and arms and then dump me in a vat of scalding water in order to remove my body hair.

She was aided by an army of turkeys, some with law degrees, who were gobbling their anger at what they presumed to be my support for cruelty to animals.

Anderson, her mascara-rimmed eyes narrowed in rage and her enhanced lips twisted in a scowl, was coming at me in a full-breasted charge which, under other circumstances, might have been appealing, but not this time. She and her companions were intent on doing to me what chicken processors supposedly do to their birds to prepare them for their roles as buffalo wings and other comestibles offered in certain takeout restaurants.

Replace the word nose with beak, arms with wings and hair with feathers, and you can visualize what they had planned. Deep fried with a crispy crust.

It was only after I feasted on turkey the next day that I was able to emotionally reestablish the role of a food bird in today’s world, specifically the turkey on Thanksgiving. One of us was the eater and the other the eatee. Guess how it worked out.

The nightmare occurred due to a column I wrote a fortnight ago that challenged the right of animal activists to blow things up and desecrate private property in the guise of protecting the nonhuman creatures among us.

In it, I made a little fun of chicken-lover Anderson, star of the animated Spike TV show “Stripperella” and self-proclaimed wannabe writer of “dirty novels for sexy girls,” as quoted in Malibu magazine. A somewhat limited literary ambition, but then I guess she knows her audience. At any rate, those same fans were incensed at what appeared to them to be my dismissal of her intellectual assets, which puzzles me, since her intellectual assets aren’t exactly what she’s famous for.

But it was Anderson’s nightmare army of turkeys that frightened me the most. They were plucked and headless and possibly stuffed with a nice dressing, but still able to gobble threats and obscenities my way. I’m sure that this element of the bad dream was rooted in the e-mails and phone calls I received that damned me to hell as an animal hater.

Among the terms and phrases employed by the e-mailers and phone-callers were milder ones like “stupid,” “friend to the meat packing/dairy industry,” “ignorant,” “arrogant” and “pompous,” and harsher ones like “a dumb ... who doesn’t give a ... about the animals that other ... are torturing for a ... profit.”

I made the mistake of trying to explain to a San Francisco animal attorney that I was not opposed to activism, only to those who bomb and destroy in the name of humane treatment for creatures smaller than us, other than elves or leprechauns. But to her, violence was simply “direct action,” a euphemism equivalent to the military dismissal of wartime civilian casualties as “collateral damage.”

If we can accept that, then we can discount the torture of animals as “food preparation techniques” and medical/product tests as “evaluation procedures.”

Organizations like PETA would have us all eating like vegetarians and wearing polyester clothes, neither of which would appeal to me or to most of my friends. However, I agree that something must be done in order to provide kinder and gentler deaths for the animals we eat and skin.

First of all, I am withdrawing my support for the bovine rebellion described in “Cows With Guns,” a satirical song written and performed not by Tom Lehrer, as I said in that earlier column, but by Dana Lyons. Gun manufacturers ought to be legally restrained from selling guns to any animal, most specifically cows.

Secondly, in the case of chickens intended as food, I believe that they ought to be raised not in crowded cages, but in facilities similar to a Club Med, with piped-in music, gourmet feed to scratch and peck, and perhaps even discos where the chicken dance is encouraged. And plenty of sex.

Their deaths ought to be handled with equal sensitivity by explaining that what’s about to happen to them is only a “procedure,” a term used on humans to dispel the notion that any pain is involved, and adding the medical phrase, “This won’t hurt a bit.” The tank of scalding water is not part of a de-feathering process, but a hot tub. Blow in a little marijuana smoke and they’ll go to their deaths singing.

And maybe I won’t have any more Pamela Anderson nightmares.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.