Turkey Pardoning Time

Fellow fans of the wonderful West Wing (that's what www stands for, right?) may remember a very funny scene in an early episode in which President Martin Sheen "pardons" a turkey from making a Thanksgiving sacrifice in a little ceremony at the White House. How we laughed at the silly and inventive script-writing! How on earth did they think that one up?, we wondered.

Well. Imagine the surprise in our house when preparations for our first Thanksgiving last week were interrupted by the news that turkey pardoning is not a script-writer's wheeze, but an actual tradition of actual Presidents.

In fact, on Tuesday 22 November - two days before Thanksgiving - President Bush and Vice President Cheney held a ceremony on a stage in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. They were joined by a gaggle of journalists, a class of visiting schoolchildren, and the chairman of the National Turkey Federation. In that esteemed company, the President pardoned a turkey named Marshmallow. How precisely he did so was not clear, although one imagines that the moment was mysterious and rather spiritual. An understudy turkey, named Yam, waiting in a van outside, was also pardoned, demonstrating that the President has long-distance pardoning powers.

However, as is so often the case regarding serious political matters such as this, controversy was not far behind. Pardoned turkeys have traditionally been sent off to somewhere called Frying Pan Park in Herndon, Virginia, where they have apparently tended not to last all that long, vis a vis this mortal coil. This year, the President announced that Marshallow and Yam did not fancy moving to Frying Pan Park; this was understandable, perhaps, but how he had established it was not entirely clear.

As an alternative, the two turkeys were sent - first class on United Airlines - to spend the rest of their days at Disneyland in California, where they took the roles of grand marshals in the Thanksgiving Day parade, before being moved to their new permanent home: an enclosure in Frontierland, near the entrance to Santa's Reindeer Roundup.

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) said that previously pardoned turkeys had been badly treated at Frying Pan Park, where they looked "lonely and neglected", and sought to take some credit for the move to Disneyland. The National Turkey Federation were keen to point out that PETA had had no influence on the switch and suggested that if members of PETA believed otherwise they were "absolutely delusionsal". Oh, politics!