[Stamford Advocate] Officials in Hartford had to shoo a turkey out of a downtown hospital, National Geographic News has reported, and a bunch of turkeys once marched up on the porch of a house in Boston and refused to leave, making hostages of the elderly women who lived there.

Google “turkey attacks.” You’ll find videos from all over the country. Turkeys chasing a bicyclist along a sidewalk, pecking at the heels of a man running through a field, running with a dog. One shows a turkey jumping into a U.S. Postal Service truck when the letter carrier stopped at a curbside mailbox.

A California woman videotaping a turkey she spotted on the side of the road ends up getting chased by it. Screaming, she runs back to her car for cover and continues taping as the turkey stands outside her door and stares at her through the window.

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What are they after here? Sympathy? I mean you’d probably be pretty pissed too if slaughtering millions of your brothers and sisters was part of an annual ritual for some other species of animal that feeds itself by keeping you and your family in a tiny pen for your entire life until they’re ready to murder you. Of course I don’t really give a fuck because meat is delicious, so before you get too excited, let me just tell you vegetarians to fuck off right now.

Yeah, I know. This article isn’t REALLY about turkeys systematically harassing bicyclists. But it might as well be. Because what this article really should tell you (and the point I’ve tried to hammer home in the previous paragraph) is that turkeys have a very well developed sense of justice. They may not be smart enough to formally organize an army of fat, flightless terrorbirds, but they know their kind has been oppressed. They know humans are the ones responsible. And damned if they’re just going to stand by and do nothing. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that turkeys take one look at a bicyclist and immediately are filled with an unstoppable desire to attack. Because I want you to notice one thing about the bolded passage up above: the turkey was chasing this bicyclist along the SIDEWALK. These are people who furiously demand that the rest of us share the road with them, but periodically decide they’d rather run over pedestrians than actually bother with a road at all. It’s called a sideWALK, motherfucker, not a sidebike. So don’t come crying to me when a wild turkey pecks your goddamn eyes out because even the lowliest animals in the animal kingdom can tell that you’re a scofflaw jerkoff who needs to be taught a lesson.

(image source)