Animal passions

IT’S BEEN A tough season for animal lovers. First, we had to endure all that wrenching footage of pets left stranded from Hurricane Katrina. Then there were those over-populous sea lions shot by fishermen along the Pacific Coast. The final straw may have been last week in the Netherlands, where, during an attempt at an exposition center to set a record by knocking down a chain of 4.1 million dominoes, a sparrow flew in and knocked down 23,000 of them. The sparrow, an endangered species in Holland, was shot and killed with an air gun, prompting a spate of controversy and several death threats against the shooter.

As grim as all that news is, there’s at least one breed of animal that’s gotten 15 minutes of benign fame. The turkey -- or at least one of its cousins -- whose leftovers you’re eating at this very moment.

To the delight of foodies, biography buffs and voyeurs, a distributor for family farms called Heritage Foods USA is bringing “traceable foods” to the mainstream. The company has a website with a 24-hour “turkey cam” that allows potential customers to keep tabs on a turkey before extending it an invitation to dinner. A Heritage turkey costs about 10 times more than a Purdue or Butterball but, according to a company spokesman, “people are starting to want to know more about the food they put in their bodies.”

It’s a bold marketing move for sure. I took a look at the Heritage Foods website, with its photos of gallant birds (and adorable piggies and lambs) and decided I wanted to know more about becoming a vegetarian. If it weren’t for the profiles of the farmers -- there’s an Arkansas livestock producer who teaches philosophy to children in his spare time -- I might have basted a hunk of tofu Thursday and left it at that.

But for other folks, Heritage Foods’ gambit probably works. Its homepage shows an earnest, seriously cheekboned Kansan who reminisces about “hanging out” with turkeys since his boyhood 4-H days. The portrait is a digital homage to Walker Evans’ dust bowl images from “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” telegraphing everything that bourgeois (read: guilty) would-be buyers of a $139 turkey long to hear. This is no ordinary hot house turkey, it silently intones. This is a turkey that led a rich and vibrant life, that enjoyed spending time outdoors and had quality time with its farmer. This is a turkey for people who, even as they yank out its innards and stuff it with empty carbs, listen to National Public Radio.

Don’t get me wrong. Anything that supports family farms is OK by me. But the whole venture, especially the feature that allows you to type in your bird’s ID number and learn about its life (it’s a Cabbage Patch Doll you can eat!) reminded me of the curious ways in which animals -- and the people who care about them -- toy with our emotions.

I am, for better or worse, one of those people for whom animal sentiment runs higher than might be expected in a generally cynical person. Though I can remain reasonably composed in the face of human suffering, I cannot so much as walk past a lost cat sign without getting choked up. I take in foster dogs. I talk to my neighbors about spaying and neutering their pets. What embarrasses me most is the degree to which I’m embarrassed about this.

Unlike people who care about the welfare of children or the elderly, those of us who fret over animals must cope with a social stigma that suggests we’re all a bunch of friendless oddballs. The most common charge, of course, is the “you care more about pets than people” accusation (I heard a lot of this after Katrina and constantly hastened to add that I’d given money to the Red Cross and the Humane Society). There’s also the specter of the crazy cat lady who spends her entire pension on Fancy Feast and rug cleaner (translation: no sex life in the last decade). Radical groups such as PETA, which seem more interested in staging demonstrations than addressing root causes, don’t help matters much either.

Still, I have a feeling I’m not alone in my desire to live in a community and a world that takes better care of its animals. Whether we choose to eat them is a personal decision, as is choosing to view them through a turkey cam. But I think we could use a little less media coverage of death threats against sparrow shooters and a little more attention paid to the animals themselves. Animal lovers are not all deranged blowhards. We just play them on TV.

As for the Heritage turkey web cam, sensitive types probably shouldn’t log on for a while. There’s a disturbing absence of turkeys on the farm this weekend.