Can Thanksgiving be "happy" without slaughter?

I am still trying to get into the right "mid-set" to read Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals. It's a sincere, melancholic account of his journey to self-realization and in the process getting rid of his dissonance. It's important for me to read this book at the right time since it hits right at my cognitive dissonance. Eating a modicum of "just and only" chicken once a week still glorifies my dissonance and I am still looking for the right D-Day. I cannot forever ameliorate this dissonance under an Aristotelian "Excess of Moderation" philosophy. Nonetheless my Grey Matter still would find thousand other ways to ameliorate but a deep reflection on "Categorical Imperative" will eventually flush down this dissonance forever.
In the mean time, this excellent review by Elizabeth Kolbert  is a fodder for a slaughter-less thanksgiving (since turkey had nothing to do with thanksgiving, until after WWII).

"Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric. Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.”
For pigs, conditions are little better. Shortly after birth, piglets have their tails chopped off; this discourages the bored and frustrated animals from gnawing one another’s rumps. Male piglets also have their testicles removed, a procedure performed without anesthetic. Before being butchered, hogs are typically incapacitated with a tonglike instrument designed to induce cardiac arrest. Sometimes their muscles contract so violently that they end up not just dead but with a broken back.

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious.
Intuitively, we all know that animals feel pain. (This, presumably, is why we spend so much money on vet bills.) “No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face,” Foer observes. And yet, he notes, we routinely eat fish that have been killed in this way, as well as chickens who have been dragged through the stunner and pigs who have been electrocuted and cows who have had bolts shot into their heads. (In many cases, the cows are not quite killed by the bolts, and so remain conscious as they are skinned and dismembered.).
Foer relates how, one night, he sneaked onto a California turkey farm with an animal-rights activist he calls C. Most of the buildings were locked, but the two managed to slip into a shed that housed tens of thousands of turkey chicks. At first, the conditions seemed not so bad. Some of the chicks were sleeping. Others were struggling to get closer to the heat lamps that substitute for their mothers. Then Foer started noticing how many of the chicks were dead. They were covered with sores, or matted with blood, or withered like dry leaves. C spotted one chick splayed out on the floor, trembling. Its eyes were crusted over and its head was shaking back and forth. C slit its throat.

“Eating Animals” closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer’s point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us."

Any creatures with mirror neurons cannot tolerate this torture and only reason we tolerate this we don't get to see the actual suffering. When the sufferings are hidden, as long as Veganism gets a political taint and as long as eating animals is equated with machoness, there will be no incentive to quit except self-actualization. The messiah (hopefully) of consiscious consumption, Goodguide shares some facts about ourThanksgiving Turkey:

• Turkeys labeled Natural may actually have been treated with antibiotics and fed corn and soy meal grown with synthetic pesticides. The USDA defines natural as a turkey containing no artificial ingredients such as added flavors or colors, and that is only minimally processed. It turns out, this leaves out a lot. A turkey labeled natural can be fed grains grown with pesticides and raised on a farm that uses pesticides on their fields. Antibiotics can be used not only to treat illnesses, but also as growth promoters.
• “Free range” turkeys may have never set foot outdoors. According to the USDA, “free range” means simply that the turkey “has been allowed access to the outside.” This can mean that they are raised primarily in “range pens” or houses, and that there is a door to the “outside,” which might simply be a cement patio. So “free range” turkeys may almost never see the range.
• “Fresh” turkeys may be over 2 months old. The USDA definition of “fresh” refers to turkeys whose internal temperature has never been below 26°F. “Hard-chilled” means the turkey was kept between 0°F and 26°F. “Frozen” means the turkey was kept at or below 0°F. The surprising thing about this standard is that it only mentions temperature, not time. Most Thanksgiving turkeys are processed in September and October, but are still labeled “fresh” in November.
  The turkeys we eat (or 99% of them) can’t run, fly, or mate when fully grown. The most common turkeys found in the US - the Broad Breasted White – have been bred to maximize their growth (particularly of breast meat), and are thus unable to reproduce without artificial insemination. They can’t run or fly, and they often go lame due to their heavy breasts. These birds grow twice as fast, and often twice as big as “heritage” turkeys – the turkeys the pilgrims would have seen.
• The vast majority of turkeys raised in the US are grown in large-scale Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) where they are often packed in tight conditions, and where their beaks and parts of their toes may be cut off to prevent pecking and cannibalism between animals.

It would rationale to assume that there wouldn't be an epidemic of Anhedonia, if and when we stop eating flesh.

"Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list” - Jonathan Safran Foer