Turkey Ladies
No.
The turkey was domesticated in Mexico. The pilgrims shot and ate wild turkeys, but these were poor, stringy substitutes for the plump, succulent birds the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica had been eating for centuries. Today, Mole de guajolote (turkey in mole sauce) is thought of as the national dish of Mexico.
I saw plenty of guajolotes being raised in dooryards. They're handsome birds compared to those white-feathered, insipid turkeys that are all breast meat, the kind sold in American supermarkets, and in Mexican ones too, where they're called pavo. But in the rural south of the country, most people buy their turkeys in the mercados.
Like this.
Oh yeah, it's a live one. They sell dead ones, too. But they sure sell a lot of them that are still kicking.
Wandering around rural Mexico—never in the cities—I'd see signs advertising pollo en pie—chicken on foot. We might say "chicken on the hoof." I correctly surmised this means live chickens, feathers and all. But why? Are they better that way? Maybe some Mexican cooks are sticklers for freshness?
None of those reasons seem very Mexican to me, not in a country where good enough is good enough.
(Look closely. The woman above is carrying two turkeys. Must be expecting company.)
The answer, of course, is lack of refrigeration. People who live in the campo often cannot afford refrigerators. Many do not even have electricity. So whatever's for dinner has to keep itself fresh until the family is ready to eat it.
The women in the markets haul their live purchases around so nonchalantly. It's no big deal. It's just the weekly turkey. Gotta buy some tomatoes, too. So they shove the birds under their arms and pick over the produce. Nobody gives it a second thought, except the slack-jawed gringo tourist who can't believe what he's seeing.
During their back-to-the-land days, my parents had a chicken coop. On rare Sundays, my father would catch one and lop its head off with a machete. My mom would dip the still-twitching carcass in boiling water and pull its feathers. She'd gut it (which grossed all us kids out) and give us the feet to play with. (We would tug on the exposed tendons to make the claws wiggle.) Mom went to a lot of work for chicken and dumplings—which I never liked anyway.
These women do it every week. Except they dispatch their birds by wringing their necks. They cook them in mole sauce and serve them with tortillas made from corn they ground themselves. Mom had it easy.
(Incidentally, one word in Mexico for slaughter, as applied to animals for food, is sacrificar, to sacrifice.)
It's not just turkeys that are sold on the hoof. This young man is leading his goat around the mercado. I don't know if he's buying or selling it.
Jean grew up in midwestern farm country. She's never seen a live animal taken for food. Her parents, like mine, bought cello-wrapped ground beef in the supermarket, or ready made burgers at the Rensselaer Dairy Queen. We've come so very far from our roots.