In keeping with White House custom, the current president of the United States, Joe Biden, ‘pardoned’ two turkeys, ‘Chocolate’ and ‘Chip,’ earlier this week on the South Lawn.
Due to the fact that a turkey (or in this case two turkeys) receives a presidential pardon from being someone’s Thanksgiving dinner and lives out the rest of its days elsewhere, the lengthy and somewhat inconsistent ritual has attracted a lot of attention in recent years.
Since turkeys are a staple of the Thanksgiving dinner, the current US president pardons a turkey every year to prevent it from being consumed. As mentioned earlier, the tradition has been sporadic and while it may have started in 1947 during Ronald Reagan’s administration it was not cemented until George Bush’s presidency in 1989.
For the holidays, there have been rumours of Americans bringing the president of the nation a turkey since the 19th century. While there are claims that former President Abraham Lincoln was the first to pardon a turkey when the first family received a live fowl for their Christmas supper and his young son pleaded with him to spare the bird, this is rumoured to be untrue.
At the time, the former president gave the turkey a ‘reprieve’ after his son argued that it had the same right to life as anyone.
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