Presidential Pardons for Turkeys

At approximately 11:00 this morning, two 19 week old, 45 pound turkeys received an official Presidential pardon!  Liberty and Peace were pardoned by President Obama in what some believe to be a long-standing tradition.....

But....
Have you ever wondered who started the practice of pardoning turkeys?   And when?  And most of all, WHY?

Every year I watch the news clips that bring a bright spot to the usually gloomy reports.  And, every year I tell myself that I'm going to look into the history of such a thing. But, I never do -- well, I never did until today!


I did some snooping around on the internet and came up with a few fun facts - trivia mostly - but not a sound accounting of the history of the Presidential Pardon of the Thanksgiving Turkey. 


If you have one of those inquiring minds that wants to know, here's what I did find:


1.  Turkeys presented for pardoning come from the National Turkey Federation which has provided turkeys to the White House since the 1940's but the Presidential pardon did not start back in the '40's.

2.  Harry Truman is credited with being the first President to officially pardon a turkey but the Truman Library has no official documentation of such an event.  It has been said that the turkey Truman pardoned was for Christmas, not Thanksgiving -- AND that the Trumans ate him!


3.  Others tell a story from Abraham Lincoln's days where he interrupted a cabinet meeting to call a halt to a possible "turkey execution" in the kitchen.   The turkey had been befriended by Lincoln's son.  Again, there is no official documentation to substantiate the tale.

4.  In 1963, just a week before his assassination, John F. Kennedy announced that he wouldn't eat the turkey and suggested that they "just keep him". 

5.  Ronald Regan joked with reporters about pardoning a turkey named Charlie while fielding questions of a more serious nature about the Iran Contra affair.


6.  President George H W Bush was the first to officially pardon a turkey in 1989

With the questions who and when essentially answered, some might have moved on... but there was still no answer to the "why" of it.... nor could I find any no matter how hard I looked!  And then, I wondered  what happens to those pardoned turkeys... I was able to uncover some details to anwer that question:

Many of the earlier ones were sent to a petting zoo in Virginia until 2004.  From 2005 to 2009, the turkeys went to Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California where they were the grand marshalls of the Thanksgiving Day parades.  After the parade, they took up residence at Disneyland's Big Thunder Ranch.  The 2010 and 2011 Obama turkeys have been sent to George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate.