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On Wednesday of this week, President Bush will be performing one of the more morbid rituals this country celebrates—the annual “Turkey Pardon” ceremony in the Rose Garden, in which he will be magnanimously sparing the lives of two turkeys (out of a field of 12 animals whose lives were put up for a vote this month) and then sending the birds to Disneyland, where they will probably die within a year due to inadequate care. I suppose the turkeys in question will be more enthused about this turn of events than they would be about the alternative, but I have to say I can think of a number of ways that I’d rather spend my Thanksgiving than being manhandled by politicians and then sent to Disneyland to die...

As we normally do at this time of year, we sent a letter to the President this morning asking him to take steps to ensure that the "pardoned" birds receive the care they will need to live out the year. You can read that letter here, and for more information about the conditions endured by the 50 million other turkeys who will be killed this Thanksgiving season, click here.

This is an old video we made a while back to talk about why PETA has occasionally resorted to some more colorful tactics like naked protests to get our point across. It must have been put together in the early days of Internet video, when people had the attention span to get all the way through a 7-minute piece, but I highly recommend sticking around through the first 3 and a half minutes to watch George W. Bush reacting to a PETA manure dump a little while before he was elected President. It's seriously priceless.