For years I heard how smart turkeys are and how hard they are to hunt. Then I started hunting them. They are a couple steps above a house plant intelligence wise at best. They can be very tuned into movement spooking them if they are hunted alot. Or vehicles trying to run them over. Once they perceive something as not a threat they don't care about much.
If I did not like to eat them I probably would not hunt them. I like to breast them cut the breast thin and then pound them out real thin. Bread them and fry them like veal or pork cutlets. Very tasty.
Years ago when turkeys were being helped along in my state they stocked a lot of birds in some areas. Including the area where my family has a cabin in northern Wisconsin. After about five years there were turkeys everywhere. Dumb as rocks. Seriously you would have a flock of twenty to fifty birds standing in the road would not move. You could pull over by a flock and they would walk up to the car from the ditch.
Well the locals must of liked the taste of them or took joy in using them as bowling pins when they blocked the road. Within a couple years you almost never saw a turkey. Wasn't until about ten years later you saw birds again. Still dumb but average dumb for turkeys. Eventually came out that to increase numbers a lot of the stocked birds were the results of wild birds being breed with captive "wild" turkeys.
I think in general there are lots of questionable genetics in most turkey populations.
