Smart or Stupid?

[Kywoodsman]

I think they side a little on the dumb side. They are just so hardwired in the head to avoid anything that might remotely ever pose a threat to them that they freak out over the littlest things they notice. There is a saying written on the wall at the bass pro shop in Nashville that says it best. "To a deer every man is a stump, to a turkey every stump is a man."

[hookedspur]

I think they are stupid ,I have seen them try to breed a pile of horse dung BUT I think they are super WARY of everything that surrounds them and they watch everything including each other ,if one sounds an alarm ,justified or not its Katy bar the door .
Instincts ? Maybe ,but I think just Goofy . 

[Spring_Woods]

Stupid creature. Very wary and stubborn.

[GobbleNut]

Would I call a turkey "smart"?  No, I don't think so.  ....But, on the other hand, would I say they are "stupid"?  I would say "no" to that, as well.  To me, they lie somewhere between those two descriptions.

They are apparently capable of learned behavior, which is part of my definition of "intelligence".  ...And here is how I justify that statement.

We have a cabin in the mountains of southern NM and in the winter months, we will set up a couple of  feeders to keep them around the place.  One of them is one of those small, five or six gallon hanging feeders.  We don't get up there much during the winter, and so the feeders run out of cracked corn sometimes before we get back up to fill them again. 

Last year was one of the times the feeder ran out.  A couple of the partners in the cabin ownership went up one weekend to check on the place.  While they were there, several mature gobblers came into the hanging feeder, which was empty except for the last bits of corn that will remain in the bottom of the container. 

They were watching the gobblers pick up a few kernels of corn on the ground under the feeder that had been jarred loose by the wind shaking the feeder a little bit.  Well, after they had scavenged all of the corn on the ground, my buddies were astonished when one of the gobblers flew up onto the feeder and starting shaking it back and forth! 

He shook some corn out of the feeder, flew back down to the ground, and all of them starting picking up that corn that he had shaken out!

Now, if that is not some rudimentary form of intelligence, someone is going to have some serious explaining to do for me to accept that it is not. 

[DC1.]

Smart ?   No    But i do think they have really good luck making decisions .   

[HogBiologist]

Turkeys are stupid.  If you knew how many time in a row I have used a cannon net and caught the same turkey over and over.  They seem smart because everything in the woods is trying to eat them.

[turkey slayer]

try to mate with a plastic or blow-up doll, although some people do this, 

only from you 

[mnturkey]

Turkeys are stupid, they are scared of there own shadows and cannot reason.
They are at the bottom of the food chain.
We as hunters think they are smater then we are because we do not want to admit that something with a brain the size of a walnut can out smart us, when in reality we outsmarted ourselves.