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The Domestic Turkey and the First Thanksgiving

10,000 Birds

The very first thing we notice about this large member of the Galliformes is that there is a wild version and a domestic version, and although the two are rather different, they are both given the same species name, Meleagris gallopavo. This is not entirely unknown among domestic animals, but many domesticates have no living wild version.

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The Nonessential Whooping Crane

10,000 Birds

Another 170 are in captivity, many of them breeding stock for reintroduction efforts. It may be as sick as deliberately targeting an endangered species for death. That’s what you do with other game, right? There are 400 whooping cranes left in the wild, 100 of them in the eastern population. The big white one.

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