'Liberty' and 'Bell' turkeys receive Biden's pardon at the White House before Thanksgiving | International

Today was the day of Freedom in the White House. Of Freedomand of BellYour partner. The two turkeys to which, in compliance with tradition, US President Joe Biden has granted a pardon on the eve of Thanksgiving, the biggest holiday on the American calendar. After the humorous ceremony, which inaugurates the winter celebration season in the United States, the bird couple is now guaranteed to spend the rest of their days in an animal care center and that neither of them will ever end up as a gala dish at A family meal.

The pardon, on a cloudy and cold day, coincided with Biden's 81st birthday. The president took the opportunity to joke about his age, perhaps in an allusion to polls in which the majority of citizens believe that he is too old to run again in the race for the White House.

“This is the 76th anniversary of this ceremony. And I want to make it clear to you that I was not here in the first one. He was too young,” she declared, to the laughter of an audience made up of White House officials, students from Washington schools and children of workers at the presidential residence.

“That's a huge turkey, people. "I'm impressed," she added, when one of the birds began to flap its wings on the table where it was located. “I hereby forgive Libertad and Campana. Congratulations, birds.”

For Bell (""Bell") and Freedom ("“Liberty”), two white males, four months old and twenty kilos each, these have been very busy days. Selected on a farm in the town of Willmar, Minnesota, they had arrived in Washington this weekend for their official presentation and the ceremony of their new life. They had stayed at the Willard, a five-star hotel and one of the most luxurious establishments near the White House. “They checked in, went up to their rooms, saw on the map what there was to do in the city, took a bubble bath and told me that they had something from the minibar,” declared the hotel manager, Markus Platzer, in a conference. press release to introduce the couple.

They also enjoyed luxury along the way. The two animals, whose names were chosen in allusion to the Liberty Bell that called the meetings of congressmen on the road to American independence in Philadelphia in 1776, had been transported in a Cadillac limousine - inside a cage, yes- in the twenty hours of road trip from Willmar to Washington, completed over three days.

Both specimens had been selected, in addition to their immaculate whiteness, for their extroverted personality, more conducive to withstanding without incident a ceremony with the level of hustle and bustle like the one this Monday at the White House. “They are totally ready for a large audience,” said Steve Lykken, president of the National Turkey Foundation. This organization is responsible for proposing pairs of turkeys that can benefit from the pardon, from which one is selected by popular vote.

Every year millions of turkeys are slaughtered and consumed around this time in the United States. This bird is the star dish and traditional food at the Thanksgiving meal, which commemorates the help in the form of food that the first British settlers received from the native population in their first harsh winter. For decades, the tradition has been joined by the presidential pardon of the couple of turkeys: the official pardoned person and his substitute.

According to tradition, the first person to ask for a turkey pardon was the son of Abraham Lincoln, who would become president, who asked his father not to sacrifice the animal that the family planned to eat at Thanksgiving. In the 20th century, President Harry Truman became the first head of state to accept the gift of a turkey from the Foundation.

But we had to wait for the term of John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) for an American president to spare the life of a turkey in the American presidential residence. And his successors Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford did not continue that budding tradition. The person who relaunched the idea and made it an annual event was President George Bush in 1989. Since then, every head of state in the country has pardoned a couple of turkeys, from Bill Clinton to Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump.

Once the ceremony at the White House was over, and the pardon was formalized, Bell and Freedom They headed back to their state of origin. There the University of Minnesota College of Food and Agricultural and Natural Resources Sciences will take care of them, on whose farms they will reside for the rest of their days.

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