Could somebody explain the Thanksgiving / turkey drop episode?
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justanicknamed — 10 years ago(September 08, 2015 06:24 AM)
Yes, and my point was that domesticated turkeys, bread to have larger breasts and limited flight abilities would have still fallen from that distance and gone splat.
I never said it was the same speed as frozen turkeys. I simply pointed out that live, thanksgiving turkeys dropped from a helicopter on to pavement would go splat. -
bgva — 12 years ago(October 15, 2013 06:53 PM)
So they probably would simply plummet to the ground.
That's exactly what they didaccording to Les' commentary "They're plopping to the ground like wet cement!" One also went through the windshield of a parked car
Oh stewardessI speak jive. -
almostfm-1 — 11 years ago(January 18, 2015 03:36 AM)
I remember hearing a report on a local station about this actually happening, a year or so before the episode aired.
My understanding is that they checked with an ornithologist who told them that turkeys couldn't fly well, but they could fly a little. The problem was that he was talking about wild turkeys, and the station that did it used domesticated oneswhich fly about as well as bowling balls. -
vinsane — 11 years ago(September 17, 2014 01:26 PM)
The first answer from hariseldon59 is pretty much spot on. In fact the commercially grown Thanksgiving birds are so breast-heavy that they can barely walk around normally by the time they're ready for harvest. I once read that the fortunate national bird that gets pardoned each year by the US president is sent to a kind of petting zoo to live out its life which is typically only a few weeks anyway. Both the ceremonial turkey and the reserve bird that is brought along to the White House in case the first one drops dead before the ceremony are quite close to their full life expectancy by the holiday.
These animals are like Franken-birds that scarcely resemble real wild turkeys like Arthur Carlson would have assumed. It still would have been a dopey idea to toss those out of a chopper though. So, in short,
turkeys really can fly
, but
Thanksgiving turkeys
are a bit of a science project on legs that have been retarded from flight to keep their white meat 'white' and artificially generous in proportion.
Here's the science if you need it:
https://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/meat/INT-what-meat-color.html
Eeek!!! I'm getting dressed.