A flock of feral turkeys becomes a mess-making, traffic-stopping nightmare for residents

Nov 22, 2013 08:32 GMT  ·  By

With Thanksgiving being just around the corner, turkeys are the center of attention. The majority of Americans are thinking of the ways in which they will cook and eat the bird on holidays, but some New Yorkers are just thinking of ways to get rid of the annoying intruders.

A flock of wild turkeys in Staten Island has become a pressing issue for the residents, making a constant mess, creating traffic jams and even attacking pets or residents, apparently getting messier and more aggressive each day.

In the early '50s, the wild turkeys were on the verge of disappearing from New York City, and in an effort to help breed the symbolic birds, their number grew from 300,000 to almost seven million. The birds are now seen as a problem in a lot of areas of New York, and officials are trying to find a solution that doesn't involve killing them.

Residents are dealing with as much as 50 wild intruders on their lawns, and even so they say that they don't want to kill the birds, they just want the turkeys to leave them alone and not cause any more problems.

Describing the problems the flock of birds has been causing, the locals talk about fouling yards, devouring gardens, making incredibly loud noises and waking up the whole neighborhood or attacking dogs and cats.

The residents of the neighborhood agree that the animals are beautiful and don't deserve to die, but they are also ruining people's properties, according to New York Daily News. A few months ago, in a similar situation, the Department of Agriculture captured and slaughtered almost 80 birds, causing a lot of controversy and even animal cruelty accusations.

Some of the residents dealing with the pesky animals declared that they would rather see the animals dead than to witness a car crash or any other kind of situation in which somebody gets hurt because of them. The turkeys are spreading way too fast and their number is now too big to keep them living in inhabited neighborhoods.

As the locals see it, there are only two solutions for the problem, either they slaughter the birds or they catch and move them to a place where they will not cause so many problems. Because they have been living in inhabited areas until now, the turkeys are half wild and half domesticated, which can be a problem if they are moved into the wilderness.