Last Thursday was Thanksgiving in the United States. Thanksgiving, one of the major American holidays of the year, is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November. It became an official Federal holiday during the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens”, to be celebrated on Thursday, November 26, 1863.
THE HOLIDAY
The event that Americans commonly call the “First Thanksgiving” was celebrated by the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts after their first harvest in the New World in 1621. This feast lasted three days, and it was attended by 90 Native Americans (as accounted by 
Edward Winslow, who was there) and 53 Pilgrims. The New England colonists were religious and accustomed to regularly observing “thanksgivings”— days of prayer thanking God for blessings such as military victory or the end of a drought. While the idea of giving thanks and celebrating the harvest was popular in certain parts of the country in the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was by no means an annual national holiday. Presidents would occasionally declare a Thanksgiving Day celebration, but the holiday hadn’t completely caught on nationwide before Lincoln’s proclamati0n.
The Turkey
Many of these early celebrations included turkey. Alexander Hamilton once stated, “No citizen of the U.S. shall refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day.” When Bradford’s journals were reprinted in 1856 after being lost for a century, they found a receptive audience with advocates who wanted Thanksgiving turned into a national holiday. Since Bradford wrote of how the colonists had hunted wild turkeys during the autumn of 1621 and since turkey is a uniquely American (and scrumptious) bird, it gained traction as the Thanksgiving meal of choice for Americans after Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday 150 years ago.
As in the early times, Americans now celebrate the holiday with a huge feast where turkey with “all the trimmings” is central. The trimmings include a variety of foods that are a tradition f
or a particular family. Many of the foods featured in a Thanksgiving feast replicate the foods at the first Thanksgiving feast. However, families may also serve their own traditional dishes taken from their particular ethnic or religious background at Thanksgiving dinner. BUT…… why did we end up with the tradition of eating turkeys during the holidays?
There are many reasons. First of all, turkeys were fresh, affordable, and big enough to feed a crowd. Americans have long preferred large poultry for celebrations because the birds could be slaughtered without a huge economic sacrifice. Cows were more useful alive than dead, and commercial beef wasn’t widely available until the late 19th century. Chicken was more highly regarded then than it is today, but rooster meat was tough, and hens were valuable as long as they laid eggs. Venison would have been another option, especially during the 17th and 18th centuries, though it would have required people to hunt for their Thanksgiving meal. There was plenty of ham or brined pork around, but it 
wasn’t considered fit for special occasions. Eating turkey was also in keeping with British holiday customs that had been imported to the New World.
The publication of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in 1843 may have helped promote the turkey as a holiday delicacy when Scrooge magnanimously sends the Cratchit family a Christmas turkey.
SO…….Auditory Training for Turkeys?
All this turkey talk leads us to the topic of the week: auditory training for the traditional Thanksgiving bird.
The story starts with the tradition of presenting a turkey to the President of the United States for Thanksgiving. President Harry Truman was the first to receive one of these birds in 1947. The first President to officially pardon a turkey from the slaughter was Ronald Regan. Since then the tradition has been repeated by all subsequen
t Presidents. The chosen turkey needs to be calm under pressure. Finding one like that can be a problem since turkeys aren’t used to being paraded in front of a crowd of noisy schoolchildren, posing for flash photography or encountering the Secret Service. In past years, the stress has led the ceremonial bird to flap about and try to escape after being spooked by everything from a shiny belt buckle to the First Family’s pets.
John Burkel, the fourth-generation farmer selected to supply this year’s turkey, took no chances. Turkeys are rather fearful birds. They are spooked easily by sound. Burkel put his birds through a regimen he hopes will acclimate them to the sights, sounds and feel of the public pardon process, all in an effort to prevent them from ruining the festivities. He feels that the day offers good publicity for the National Turkey Federation, so it is important to have the turkey on its best behavior. That means getting the bird used to sudden applause and short speeches and the much pomp and circumstance of the occasion.
So the Auditory Training helps modify the behavior of the turkeys as they audition for their pardon. You might say 
it’s a matter life and death in the turkey shed, and successful auditory training is extremely important to the survival of that one turkey that escapes the holiday slaughter. Turkey auditory training, according to Mr. Burkel, involves leaving a stereo on at all hours, and the playlist is John Mayer by day and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by night. A few of Mr. Burkel’s five children’s favorites are mixed throughout. This gets the turkey used to strange, ambient noises. When Mr. Burkel headed to his 17-year-old daughter Andrea’s high school volleyball matches, he tuned the local radio station to the game so the turkeys were subjected to loud cheers and whistles. “The first time there was a Beyoncé song in there [Halo], they gobbled,” said Mr. Burkel. “But then they get used to it and they don’t gobble any more.”
Auditory training has many forms. Of course, we use it to train patients with hearing loss to use their residual hearing to their maximum benefit. And while it does not have the sophistication of LACE, it seems that auditory training can be used to train the simplest of minds, by conditioning turkeys to present their best behavior – and give them a chance at a Presidential pardon!
