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Turkey ShootJune 22, 2008 During the Great Anti-Moped Crusade of 1988, it dawned on me that on Martha's Vineyard the zeal and rhetoric devoted to an issue are generally inversely proportional to the issue's importance. Around the same time I discovered what I call Snowmobiles in Christiantown Syndrome, which is that the amount of time devoted to an issue in town meeting is inversely proportional to the amount of money involved. One year at West Tisbury town meeting, at least half an hour was taken up with snowmobiles disturbing the peace of the Christiantown area of town, but the school budget of well over a million dollars (which seemed a huge sum at the time) went up and down in about fifteen minutes. This wasn't hard to figure out: Anyone who can string a few sentences together can wax eloquent about marauding snowmobiles, but to critique the school budget you have to know what you're talking about, and that requires an investment of considerable time and effort. The popularity of the anti-moped crusade was likewise easy to explain: Moped riders were day-trippers, i.e., no one we knew personally; we did know the owners of the moped-rental companies, at least by hearsay, but they were seen as a pretty sleazy bunch; and, best of all, we had the best interests of the moped riders at heart, i.e., we were trying to spare them serious injury and a trip to the ER. All this is by way of preamble, because there's a real good'un on the front page of the current Martha's Vineyard Times: "Turkey perp charges police, gets plugged." Just after noon on Father's Day two employees delivering rental baby equipment to a house in Chilmark were attacked by a belligerent tom turkey. They were so alarmed that they took refuge in their van, jettisoned the equipment, and called 911. Two Chilmark police officers showed up. One of them, patrolman Jeff Day, took five shots at the turkey, killing it. His colleague, special officer Matthew Gebo, wrote in his report: "To ensure the wild turkey was killed, Officer Day shot the wild turkey again to effectively euthanize the wild turkey." The story, O happy day, does not end there. Neighbors Jonathan and Linda Haar were outraged by the shooting. They had raised the turkey, whom they called Tom, since he was an orphaned chick. Mr. Haar accosted Officers Day and Gebo, which, wrote Times reporter Janet Hefler, "led to an altercation between him and the two police officers, who arrested him on charges and battery and resisting arrest." There's more. You really should read the whole story, and you especially should read the comments that follow the online version. Earlier this morning there were more than 40. They're a hoot. Among other things, you'll learn that Tom was a feral turkey, not a wild one -- "feral" signifying a domestic animal that has slipped the bonds of domestication and gone to fend for itself. Unaccountably the lyrics of the old ballad "Henry Martin" are now running through my head; Henry Martin drew lots with his brothers and became the one who had to "turn robber all on the salt sea, for to maintain his two brothers and he." Robber, marauder, freelancer -- I'm beginning to identify with that turkey, and it's clear from the comments that I'm not the only one. Others, however, just as clearly identified with the rental company employees, trapped in their van by a large, rampaging tom turkey. A few sympathized with the cops, but it seems that Officer Day is not universally beloved in his town. I don't pay much attention to doings in Chilmark so this was news to me and, of course, intriguing in its own right. While I was living on Dunham Ave. in Vineyard Haven, I got a call one day from an Airborne driver who was trying to deliver a package to my door. Turns out he was parked about eight feet from that door but didn't dare get out of his van because he was being threatened by a large dog. The large dog, of course, was Rhodry, who had learned from experience that delivery drivers carry biscuits and was looking for his. Seen from one angle Rhodry might have been an enterprising highwayman who extorts tribute at impromptu toll booths, but the UPS and FedEx drivers who've delivered my parcels all these years rarely saw it that way, and neither did the meter readers, the bug sprayers, and other tradesfolk who came by for one reason or another. On Martha's Vineyard most of these people carry biscuits, and most Vineyard dogs are overjoyed to see them -- Rhodry would climb into the UPS trucks, certain that there had to be cookies in at least one of those boxes. What to a dog person looks like an overjoyed and appreciative (if a tad greedy), albeit large, dog, to a non-dog person looks like a threat. Whether the techniques that work with dogs would work as well with turkeys I don't know. Probably not. Some familiarity with turkeys might have helped, however, and maybe a water pistol or a can of pepper spray. Rhodry's nephew Joe Pye was shot and killed by a neighbor. The neighbor had livestock (chickens and goats, as I recall) and so had the right to shoot any dog who came on his property and might be a menace to the livestock. I support a farmer's right to do this, but in this particular instance there are compelling reasons to believe that Joe Pye was not threatening the livestock (his owner was right behind him) and that this guy likes to shoot dogs. I don't believe that the Chilmark police officer has a turkey-shooting track record, but some of the online comments suggest that he's been known to use forceful methods before less forceful possibilities have been exhausted, so who knows. X-rays taken near the end of Rhodry's life revealed a mysterious piece of buckshot in his right hind leg. I don't know for sure how it got there, but I have my suspicions; what I suspect is that he was somewhere he shouldn't have been, but I'm glad he got away. The reason I suspect this is that Joanie Jenkinson, West Tisbury's wonderful animal control officer, tipped me off that a dog that might have been Rhodry was seen in the company of a dog who was almost certainly his older brother Tigger in a place where neither one of them should have been. That was all the heads-up I needed. I kept a closer eye on Rhodry after that, and when I couldn't, I tied him up. When I hadn't been on the island all that long, several dog-related altercations between neighbors wound up in the lap of the West Tisbury selectmen. These incidents tended to take place in big subdivisions where neighbors didn't know each other. John Alley, then a selectman, made a comment that made a big impression on me; it went something like "Sooner or later these people have got to talk to each other." Which is to say that when people know each other, they're more likely to cut each other a little slack (even if they don't especially like each other), and they're more likely to try to work things out before they call the selectmen. Or the cops. This spring the chairman of West Tisbury's board of assessors summoned a police officer to forestall (his version) trouble at a regularly scheduled, open-to-the-public meeting that hadn't even started it. True, tempers had been running high, but there was just about no evidence that anything was likely to happen requiring police intervention. A little while back, the director of the Oak Bluffs senior center called the cops because several senior citizens refused to vacate a room he thought they shouldn't be in. In both incidents, the cops weren't happy to be there, and the summoner wound up with much egg on his face. If people had been talking to each other -- and, maybe more important, listening to each other -- would the police have been called? I doubt it. And that's why the abrupt demise of Tom the turkey is more than just a funny story about people acting, reacting, and overreacting, and it's way more than a story about how "quaint" the Vineyard is. (Don't get me started on that one.) It's a story about people assuming the worst, about each other as well as that turkey, and acting accordingly. Magnify the tale a few times and you've got a society whether governments need secrecy, repressive laws, and guns to protect themselves from the citizenry, and the citizens need lawyers (and maybe guns) to protect themselves from the government. Quaint the Vineyard ain't. A microcosm -- that it is.
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