Rep. Dina Titus has long had a reputation as an animal-welfare advocate. Now, she has a new beast in her sights: turkeys.

The Nevada Democrat will introduce legislation to prevent the sometimes deadly practice of throwing live wild turkeys from low-flying planes at the Yellville, Arkansas Turkey Trot Festival.

“It’s always been an issue for me,” Titus said about animal welfare.

The festival goes back more than 70 years and includes a parade and a Miss Drumsticks Pageant, which judges human contestants on their legs. Yellville is proud of its festival and its website says that “The town is now known far and wide for its annual Turkey Trot Festival. The event is held the second weekend in October and includes the National Wild Turkey Calling Contest.”

In recent decades, the festival has also included a small plane flying over the gathered crowd from which turkeys are thrown from about 500 feet. The turkey drop, as it is known, is not officially part of the festival, but is a tradition that grew to be a staple event for festival goers.

While crowds cheer, others are horrified. The turkeys, which spend most of their lives on the ground and only fly short distances, are often injured upon impact and one turkey died during the 2016 festival.

After first hearing about the turkey drop, Titus wrote to the Federal Aviation Administration seeking a regulatory fix. But the FAA told her it didn’t have the authority to take any action. So Titus, who is a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and sits on the panel’s Aviation Subcommittee, tried to offer an amendment to legislation reauthorizing legislation governing the FAA.

Titus told the House Rules Committee, which decides which amendments can be offered to legislation on the House floor, that the Yellville turkey drop was similar to an episode of the late 1970s sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati when a radio station promotion consisted of tossing turkeys out of a helicopter.

“In that episode, an on-air reporter witnessed the event as turkeys were thrown from the aircraft and they plummeted to earth while people below were running for their lives to avoid being hit by these turkeys,” Titus said. “Something very similar to that exists in real life.”

She said she was disappointed that she was not allowed to offer her amendment. “Obviously it is an FAA problem,” she said.

The turkey drop had attracted the attention of animal rights groups and the Yellville Chamber of Commerce recently announced that it would no longer sponsor the festival.

"After much consideration, discussion and soul searching, it is with a heavy heart that we announce that the Yellville Area Chamber of Commerce will no longer be the promoter of the Turkey Trot Festival," chamber officials wrote in the news release, according to the Baxter Bulletin. "Our decision was not entered into lightly."

The Mid-Marion County Rotary Club has voted to take over sponsorship of the festival, but only if there is no turkey drop, according to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette also published an editorial earlier this month celebrating the possible end of the turkey drop which “is good news not only for the turkeys but for this state’s reputation, which only now is recovering from the bad old days when Arkie was a synonym for all that was poor, backward and ignorant.”

Titus called that “good news” but she still plans to introduce a bill.

“I will," Titus said. "I want to make a statement to let them know we’re serious.”

The Nevada Democrat has a history of supporting animal welfare bills going back to her time in the state Senate, where she served between 1988 to 2008. In 2007, she introduced a bill that requires the state and localities to account for the needs of persons with pets or service animals in emergency management plans.

Last year, she introduced a bill to prohibit the secretary of Veterans Affairs from conducting medical research causing significant pain or distress to dogs and a separate bill to protect animals during natural disasters.

She typically scores 100 percent on the Humane Scorecard published by the Humane Society Legal Fund, which works to pass animal protection laws at the state and federal levels.