6 November 2007
My brother bloggers – Dave Barry and Scott Adams are two names that spring to mind – often regurgitate an amusing article from a magazine or newspaper which permits them to eschew that annoying requirement to come up with something original while still providing the required column inches.
I am the first to acknowledge that Dave and Scott are, of course, minor gods and I prostrate myself at their feet; also, they publish every day whilst I only do so when the muse kicks me in the tushy; also, they actually have readers whereas I just write this for myself, but, nonetheless ….
Don’t condemn either one of my heroes, what they do is both sensible and entertaining. Why think of something new when there may be something much more interesting that you can filch from the papers? I’d do it myself more often, expanding available personal grooming time, increasing my real world work day and generally benefiting myself all around. The problem has been this conceit that I’ve got something uniquely me inside that’s trying to make its way onto the screen.
Well, that may be so some of the time but it’s certainly not so today. I have to acknowledge that ‘New Scientist’s’ 3 November issue, page 53, has anything I can come up with beat hollow. No contest.
So, what is it that is so fascinating it has caused me to abandon a long-held policy. Turkeys, my friends, turkeys …
I was in graduate school myself for a preternaturally long time so I’m very sympathetic with Marty Schien and Eddie Hale, two early 1960’s Penn State graduate students who, I’m pretty sure, had been waaaay too long in the Nittany Valley by the time our story opens. Clearly Schien and Hale drank a lot of beer because, firstly, that’s the condition of graduate students and, secondly, no one could be sober and come up with their topic of research: turkey sex. It was 1960’s, most of the United States was still suffering a post –Eisenhower hang-over (which Marty and Eddie were cleverly able to avoid by continuing to drink beer, even after they’d come up with the subject of their research). The cold, hard reality of Vietnam hadn’t yet hit home, we were New Frontiering, Peace Corps-ing, heading for the moon and trying to get booty desperately from a sex that still hadn’t managed wide-spread adoption of the pill. So, it was a rough but deluded time. Marty and Eddie deserve our respect for their bleary-eyed navigation of those ‘National Lampoon’ years.
The circumstances behind this discovery are hidden in the mists of time but, evidently with this excess amount of time on their hands (a common condition for graduate students) and, as I’ve noted, several bottles of beer to the good, Marty and Eddie observed that horny (how did they know that?) male turkeys placed in a room with a life-like model of a female turkey demonstrated all of the intelligence of human fraternity brothers and mated with it as happily as they might have with the real thing.
Inspired by this startling result, Marty and Eddie celebrated with another couple of beers and then embarked on a series of experiments to determine the minimum stimulus it takes to excite a male turkey (I could have told them that the minimum stimulus was beer. I should also note, parenthetically, that the results are equally applicable to college students.) Their research really began to break new ground now as they removed various parts from the female turkey model, one at a time, until the male turkeys lost interest.
Tails, feet, wings – Eddie and Marty removed them all – but the still clueless birds – the record is unclear whether they might have been fed beer during the research – kept on keeping on, gobbling amorously and climbing up on the hapless model.
In the end Schien and Hale proved, and I think this is the important part, that turkeys are actually more mature and discerning than frat brothers, they eventually reduced the female to just a head on a stick with which the birds dutifully attempted to copulate. Try that with any 1960’s vintage Frat brother!
Stick with me here, this really was going on. It is scientific fact as reported in the prestigious ‘New Scientist’ that I cited above. And the results of these experiments were published in 1965 in ‘Sex and Behavior’ (which most ex-college students of the male persuasion would pay to write!).
And, let’s remember, we shouldn’t make fun of turkeys without considering our own giblets first. We humans, frat-brothers or not, have been trying to mate with all manner of things for a long time. Dave Barry has written about vacuum cleaners and Scott Adams copped something about a man convicted of having it on with his bicycle (both columns, I add, ‘borrowed’ from the original work of others). Our ‘New Scientist’ article ends up recounting the sad case of Thomas Granger, a New England teenager who, in 1642, was executed for having had sex with a turkey!
I cannot write anything more. My keyboard is wet and I need a shower.
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