Gordon Clay here. Every year, the President pardons one lucky turkey, allowing the bird to finish its days roaming a farm instead of sliced on a platter. However, the turkey on your dinner plate lived a very different life. Today, the overwhelming majority of turkeys we eat are raised in industrial operations that produce 100,000 birds or more a year in crowded warehouses, referred to as concentrated animal feeding operations.

The massive quantities of waste produced by these animals and the routine administration of antibiotics to healthy birds needed to prevent illness have turned these farms into significant and growing threats to public health and clean water. Last year more than 248 million turkeys were raised in the United States, generating about 4.8 billion pounds of manure. Unlike human sewage, this waste is often spread without being treated on nearby cropland. Additionally, these operations routinely feed poultry, pigs and cattle a steady diet of antibiotics in order to speed up their growth and help protect them in the crowded, unsanitary living conditions. This creates the ideal breeding ground for dangerous antibiotic-resistant superbugs that can infect humans. Incredibly, up to 70 percent of U.S. antibiotics important in medicine go to food animals, often to animals that aren’t sick.

The Obama administration publicly committed to tackling the risks associated with industrial animal agriculture, and now is the time for action. Please urge the White House to move forward on rules to protect us from the misuse of antibiotics. This is not the time to pardon industrial animal agriculture!

Pass the turkey, please. Better yet, pass on the turkey this Thanksgiving.