Mark Spradlin: When do people put a collar on a turkey’s neck?

Thursday is Thanksgiving Day.  I was raising turkeys in the garden to fatten them up and to do a little work in the garden to help out.  They were doing pretty good too.

 

I went back this morning to round up the herd of turkeys and guess what?  They weren’t there!  Imagine that?  They had been pretty happy working in the garden and eating bugs and a few left over vegetables and digging through the compost.  I looked for tracks leading from the garden and found none.  But then you have to remember that turkeys can fly for short distances if they are not too fat.

So I figure another animal or something spooked them and they flew across the pond into the park.  You would still think they would eventually come back.  As I stood there with my carving utensils I heard a noise.  It sounded like a squadron of helicopters was coming in for a landing.  I turned around and there were twice as many turkeys as I had before.  WOW!  This was really great.  The turkeys that I had been feeding came up to me and gathered around because they knew I would give them something to eat.

The new turkeys were a little shy and stand offish and didn’t want to get too close.  The older turkeys got behind the newer ones and encouraged them closer to me.  As I fed them some corn and grain I noticed a collar around their necks.  Now since when do people put a collar on a turkey’s neck?  I grabbed hold of one and took it off and read what it said.  I was shocked!  It seems that a local family was tagging their range free turkeys with a small collar.  I wasn’t real sure what was going on but I figured that my turkeys went out on a search and rescue mission to save a turkey.  Imagine that!

Now they return with turkeys that belong to someone else.  After I took the collar off of the first turkey it is like they all lined up so I could take all their collars off of them.  All of them had the same family name on them.  I thought about calling them but they were always talking about their range free turkeys they were raising and I just had to laugh.  They were ranging free now and probably weren’t going to go home.  I bet that next year they will go rescue some more turkeys from that same family.  I hope they don’t come looking for them.  The family I mean, for the turkeys, and I sure don’t want to get caught with a bunch of little turkey collars.

So if you have ordered a range free bird and you go to pick it up and it is not available just remember it is not their fault.  I guess I raised a bunch of thieving turkeys.  So if Ben, April and Mary want their turkeys back it will cost you.