Bagging the Perfect Bird

There I stood, surveying the large group of plump turkeys, trying to decide which one to take home for Thanksgiving. Some were small, probably around five to ten pounds. Others were approaching the twenty-pound range. And suddenly I saw it. The perfect bird. It had to be at least twenty-five pounds. Enough to feed the whole family we would be enjoying Thanksgiving with.

Had I lived back in the early colonial times, I’d be using a blunderbuss right now. You know, one of those guns with a funny bell-shaped muzzle that most likely scared everything off after you shot it, it was so loud. Nowadays a shotgun is more practical, but there are those who insist on continuing to use old-fashioned guns such as the blunderbuss to make their bird hunt more exciting.

Me? I don’t even use a gun. “Then surely you must be an archer, hunting your turkey with a bow and arrows,” you say. Nope. Not even that. I use my bare hands. That’s right, I rely on nothing other than what God saw fit to give me. None of those fancy inventions and contraptions that give humans a completely unfair advantage against wildlife. Don’t think I’m judging you if you do use one of those unnatural devices. You are much safer with those items, especially since we don’t have sharp teeth and claws like most of the creatures out there.

Humans have been actively defying the old “survival of the fittest” theory for thousands of years now. We walk out there in nature, where newborn deer, sick moose, and aging pheasants are typically the ones picked off by predators, and we flip the natural world upside down by looking for the biggest and strongest prey and removing it from the gene pool. If you ask me, dinosaurs didn’t go extinct from some natural disaster or from shifting ecological trends; they went extinct because humans decided to go after the biggest prey imaginable. Unfortunately back then there wasn’t a group of people dedicated to preserving various animals, like the World Wildlife Fund, and thus the largest and most ferocious predators became extinct due to the ingenuity of humans. That’s what I think.

Anyway, after looking for the best way to approach the perfect bird I had just discovered, I slowly made my way toward it. I literally had to nudge an old woman out of the way in order to get to it. Apparently I wasn’t the only one shopping early for Thanksgiving. As I grabbed the frozen bird wrapped tightly in white plastic, my eyes shot down to the weight. Dang! I was off a couple of pounds. It turned out to be only twenty-three pounds. Oh well.

I’m thankful this Thanksgiving season for people who are willing to kill my food for me, because I’m a softie and don’t even like killing the occasional spider or bee that finds its way into my house. I would definitely be a vegetarian if it weren’t for butchers and slaughterhouses. Well maybe not; if I can gut a fish, I can work my way up to bigger animals, right? At any rate, it’s nice to be able to go to the store and simply pick up a pound of meat without having to deal with the whole butchering process.

I hope you are able to find the perfect bird for this Thanksgiving, whether you shoot it with a gun or bow and arrow or you pick it up from the grocer’s. And remember: Be thankful!