The Social Cognition of Your Thanksgiving Dinner

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Even still, we tend to think of the turkey as a fairly unintelligent bird, skilled at little more than waddling around, emitting the occasional "gobble," and frying up golden-brown-and-delicious. But...what if I told you that the domestic turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) could actually be quite clever, at least when it comes to social cognition? Apocryphal or not, Ben Franklin may have been on to something with the "Bird of Courage."

Head on over to Scientific American to catch my latest contribution to their Guest Blog: Turkey talk: The social cognition of your Thanksgiving dinner

Buchwalder, T. (2003). A brief report on aggressive interactions within and between groups of domestic turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 84 (1), 75-80 DOI: 10.1016/S0168-1591(03)00149-7

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tags: Wild Turkey, Meleagris gallopavo,
In honor of our most beloved Thanksgiving dinner guest:
"As Thanksgiving ebbs into memory and Christmas looms on the horizon, Eat This Podcast concerns itself with the turkey. For a nomenclature nerd, the turkey is a wonderful bird. Why would a bird from America be named after a country on the edge of Asia?
This is the time of year that we rightfully contemplate the noble Turkey.