Turkey trouble has been cooking at the CBC.

In the wake of an online campaign waged by animal activists, the CBC’s Vinyl Cafe radio program has decided to edit out portions of Stuart McLean’s beloved holiday story, “Dave Cooks the Turkey.” The campaigners alleged some listeners deemed parts of the fictional tale degrading to animals.

“We wanted to encourage them to do better than that,” said Yan Roberts, who spearheaded the campaign. “If our media culture is creating a situation that accepts abuse and abusive deaths towards farmed animals, it lends itself to a culture where that becomes normalized.”

In the story, Dave, the bumbling protagonist who stars in McLean’s most famous Vinyl Café yarns, promises wife Morley that he will take care of their Christmas turkey. Come Christmastime, however, Dave realizes that he’s forgotten to buy a bird. He rushes to a grocery store in the middle of the night to find that they only have one unappetizing, frozen, Grade B turkey left. Dave takes it home and defrosts it with an electric blanket and hairdryer.

“As the turkey defrosted it became clear what Grade B meant,” a recorded version of the story goes. “The skin on the right drumstick was ripped. Dave’s turkey looked like it had made a break from the slaughterhouse and dragged itself a block or two before it was captured and beaten to death.”

Cue laughter.

Unable to operate his oven, Dave eventually brings the bird to a hotel for cooking, where the chef says that it looks like the turkey had been “abused.”

Laughs galore.

Since debuting on the Vinyl Cafe’s 1996 Christmas special, “Dave Cooks the Turkey” has been aired almost every holiday season since. The story has even appeared in a smattering of Vinyl Cafe CDs and books.

Last week, Roberts, who runs a vegan bed and breakfast and farm animal sanctuary in Nippising, created a website encouraging people to write to the show to complain about the offending portions of the story. Roberts also penned a piece for the Huffington Post. By the end of the week, Vinyl Cafe had received hundreds of letters from concerned listeners.

The show responded with a posting on its Facebook page on Dec. 12.

“Clearly we don’t want any part in the abuse of animals, nor in promoting the abuse of animals,” the post read.

“The story will be on the show next weekend. But we have made a few small changes. We have edited out a couple of lines that, after reading some of the thoughtful letters that have come in over the past week, we no longer feel comfortable airing on our show.”

The decision has prompted more than 1,900 comments, both commending and criticizing the show’s decision to edit the Canadian holiday favourite.

“I’m honoured that a story I wrote 20 years ago could still provoke such feelings and reactions,” Vinyl Cafe writer and host McLean said via telephone from Kitchener, where he is currently on his annual Vinyl Cafe Christmas tour.

“Does my story foster animal abuse? Does it create an environment where it makes it more acceptable to abuse animals? And then on the other hand, is this political correctness run amok? These are fantastic questions to be addressed.”

Since the Vinyl Cafe’s announcement, Roberts complains that he’s been receiving vitriolic emails and phone calls from disgruntled McLean fans.

What do you think?

“For many Canadians, their holiday meal includes a turkey that was violently raised and abused before being slaughtered,” he says. “But I can totally understand how people can be in denial about something existing, because previously I thought an angry mob of Vinyl Cafe fans seemed about as unlikely as a Polkaroo mafia.”

Once the issue came to his attention, the laughter that followed his jokes about the abused bird gave McLean pause.

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“Knowing what we know about the mistreatment of animals now, would people laugh at that? It was written in a different context, 20 years ago, so we thought that maybe there’s a point here.”

McLean says he doesn’t expect to put turkey on his plate this holiday season. Neither, of course, does Roberts.

“They’re really personable,” Roberts says of turkeys.

“Pretty much everyone who comes through the gates here just falls in love with them.”