Turkey ‘safe, warm’ after police rescue from homeless camp, California shelter says
This California turkey had a better Thanksgiving week than most.
Animal control officers from the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter and rangers from the local police department rescued a neglected turkey on Tuesday from a homeless encampment near the San Lorenzo River, according to a shelter Facebook post the same day.
“The turkey had reportedly been living in the encampment for several weeks,” rescuers said in the post, sharing pictures of the bird. “It is now safe, warm and being fed at our shelter.”
The Santa Cruz Police Department said in a Facebook post Tuesday that the “unnamed turkey is resting comfortably.”
Animal control officers suspected the turkey was stolen and asked rangers for help rescuing it from the abandoned camp, according to police.
Todd Stosuy, field services manager for the Santa Cruz County Animal Shelter, said the unnamed domesticated bird was discovered in the tent with its own feces on the food it was meant to eat, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.
Per the newspaper, the “tent was attached to another tent that officials believed someone was living in, but the person was not there when the turkey was retrieved, Stosuy said. Other people at the camp said the turkey had been there for a week or two, according to Stosuy.”
Some commenters on the shelter’s Facebook post asked how they could adopt the bird.
“Who rescued the humans?” one Facebook user asked Santa Cruz police on their post. “Or were they left there to suffer?”
Police replied that “no humans were there” at the time.
There were 1,204 people experiencing homelessness in Santa Cruz in 2017, according to city estimates — and 78 percent of those people were “unsheltered, meaning they live on the streets, in encampments or in vehicles.”
Those 2017 numbers were high enough that, at the time, the city had the fourth biggest per capita homeless population in California, the city said.
This story was originally published November 29, 2019 at 5:34 PM with the headline "Turkey ‘safe, warm’ after police rescue from homeless camp, California shelter says."
