Reason #921 to boycott Thanksgiving.

At this point in human history, it's no secret that the Thanksgiving we all know and love is a made-up crock-o-bullshit.

Not only was there no turkey at the Thanksgiving dinner table, but the main course of the night seemed to be murder, as pilgrims spent more time slaughtering Native Americans than they did eating animals for supper that fateful night in 1621.

But what you don't know is that, while pilgrims weren't making turkeys a part of their diet, they were making them a part of their sex lives. Yes, children, as if you needed more reason for Thanksgiving disillusionment, a new historical account has come out saying those puritanical weirdos were fucking the native turkeys more than they were eating them. And with that … stuffing is ruined forever.

The valuable intel comes from an event that occurred 21 years after the Thanksgiving massacre when a man named Thomas Granger was executed in Plymouth for having sex with a number of animals … most notably, turkeys. This grim incident happened in the midst of a sin epidemic, in which pilgrim settlers were being executed and torture-punished left and right for a number of lewd, illegal acts of fornication. 

Then-Governor William Bradford wrote about Granger in his now- famous diary, Of Plymouth Colony, and, and he had this to say:

"He was this year detected of buggery, and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the history requires it."

Yeesh. As the story goes, someone walked on on Granger, who was then a teenage servant, engaging in what Bradford calls "lewd practice towards the mare." Eventually, Granger confessed to having sex with the horse regularly, along with several other farm animals, and that's when his preference for white meat was revealed.

Weirdly, back then, the punishment for bestiality was worse than rape. Whereas rapists were simply whipped and publicly shamed, Vice reports that bestiality participants were forced to watch all the animals they had sex with get murdered in front of them, before being executed themselves.

Granger's acts were extreme, but pilgrim history is full of other accounts of early settlers making gravy in ungodly ways. As Vice reports, "Plymouth court records from 1642 tell the story of Edward Michell, who was accused of "lewd and sodomitical practices tending to sodomy with Edward Preston, and other lewd carriages with Lydia Hatch," who was also punished for sharing a bed with her brother. All this came to light because Preston apparently propositioned a man named John Keene, who turned him down and told the authorities. Keene was then ordered to watch while the two Edwards were whipped. Another, tamer, example of sexual wrongdoing was the case of John Casley and his fiancee, Alis, who were discovered to have had sex before their marriage; John was whipped while Alis was forced to look on from the stocks."

Damn. That really puts our miniscule Tinder ghosting problem into perspective …

Well, we guess if there's anything to be thankful this Thanksgiving, it's that if you're reading this, you probably aren't a turkey.

Now go eat some mashed potatoes and gloat over your fortune.