Why Does The President Pardon A Turkey For Thanksgiving?

Some Thanksgiving traditions just make sense: sharing a meal with friends and family, eating too much pumpkin pie, fighting over the TV remote. But the president of the US taking time out of, y’know, running the country to stand in the Rose Garden and give a pardon to a turkey that doesn’t appear to have committed a crime? Yeah… that’s a bit of an odd one. So where exactly does this bizarre custom come from?

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There’s a long-told tale that the first presidential turkey pardon was dished out by President Abraham Lincoln after his son, Tad, asked his father to spare it, having become fond of the bird. However, it’s likely that this story is apocryphal; the story was first told by White House correspondent Noah Brooks in 1865, after Lincoln was assassinated. Even if there was some truth to it, Brooks had mentioned the turkey was brought home for Christmas dinner – not Thanksgiving.

It would still be well over 200 years before turkey pardoning turned into the yearly presidential tradition that it is today. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would go on to claim that Harry Truman was the first to start the official turkey pardon, but staff at the Truman Library have found no evidence to indicate the he had done so. In fact, he’d even suggested to reporters on occasion that the gifted turkeys were going to end up in his belly.

The pardoned turkeys get to stay in a luxury hotel the night before the ceremony, because why the hell not?

Still, there was the odd unofficial reprieve given here and there. In 1963, for example, President John F. Kennedy received a hefty 25-kilogram (55-pound) white turkey for Thanksgiving and, in response, reportedly said, “We’ll just let this one grow,” and requested it be sent on its merry way back home to the farm.

Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan also received turkeys during their presidencies, and chose too to spare them from the Thanksgiving dinner table. 

But it wasn’t until 1989 that the turkey pardon became an official White House event. The president at the time was George H. W. Bush, who may have been under pressure from the throngs of animal rights activists protesting near the building.

On receiving a turkey that year, he said: “But let me assure you, and this fine tom turkey, that he will not end up on anyone’s dinner table, not this guy – he’s presented a Presidential pardon as of right now – and allow him to live out his days on a children’s farm not far from here.”

And so, an annual tradition was born. A slightly strange one to anyone outside of the US, but definitely still not as weird as wheeling out a groundhog every February to predict the weather.