It’s almost Thanksgiving—have you bought your robot turkey yet?

• In 2003, wildlife conservation officers in Michigan faced a spate of illegal turkey poachers. They didn’t call the Detroit police, one-time employer of Robocop—they brought in Robo Turkey. Several models of the $1,000 animatronic bird were placed in fields and woodlots around the state’s northern counties to protect wild turkeys. Robo Turkey looks like the real thing…from a distance. Officers can operate the bird via remote control to make him move around and shake his tail feathers, in order to attract illegal hungers. Robo Turkey has caught hundreds of poachers in the past decade.

• Are you dreading the thought of having to choke down some dry and uninspired Stove Top stuffing this Thanksgiving? You have options. In 2010, the food blog Endless Simmer assembled a list of the craziest stuffing ideas its writers could find. Among the suggestions: meatloaf stuffing, fried stuffing croquettes, stuffing pizza, and, weirdest of all, stuffing made from White Castle sliders.

• By now you’ve probably heard all about turducken—it’s a meat feast made from sticking a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey and roasting the whole thing. And while American Thanksgiving isn’t widely celebrated in the Middle East, chefs there have concoted a similar, even more bizarre dish: “camel turducken,” or “stuffed camel.” There are variations, but it typically begins with eggs stuffed inside of a fish, stuffed inside of a chicken, stuffed inside of a sheep, stuffed inside of a full-grown camel. It takes about 24 hours to cook a stuffed camel. The dish once made the pages of Guinness World Records for “Largest Single Food Item on Any Menu.”