Mashantucket — It’s a melancholy time of year for turkeys, anyway.

But, this?

THIS was the gobbler equivalent of accidentally steering your vacation RV off the highway to find a gas station — and finding out you’ve driven right into a fire-fight in Kosovo.

Yes, on Saturday afternoon, just off the spangly corridors of the Foxwoods Resort Casino and inside a massive Pequot Ballroom festooned in harvest-colored balloons, 11 professional eaters each ripped apart and savagely attempted to devour their own 22-pound roast turkey.

It was billed as the Foxwoods World Turkey-Eating Championship, a first-time event sanctioned by Major League Eating — the competitive-gluttony folks who oversee such gastronomic overloads as the annual Fourth of July Nathan’s International Hot Dog Eating Contest, the U.S. National Buffalo Wing Eating Championship, the World Twinkie Eating Championship and many more.

An all-star lineup of Major League eaters showed up to see who could inhale the most of his or her bird in 10 minutes. A crowd of about 250 fans seemed very happy that Joey “Jaws” Chestnut, the No. 1-ranked eater in the world — and the guy who might be thought of as the pre-fire hydrant Tiger Woods of food consumption — won the championship handily.

Chestnut ate 9.35 pounds of turkey and claimed a $5,000 winners check, while fellow eating superstars Matt Stonie was runner-up (8.45 pounds) and Miko Sudo (6.2 pounds) finished third.

To watch such an event is actually sort of humbling. The energy and rote savagery of the eaters is off-putting at first, but takes on a metronomic and precision quality that seems void of thought or gastronomic satisfaction. It’s like watching 11 automatons — at least until the bell rings and the turkey carcasses are whisked offstage to be weighed.

Then, as the competitors await results, the aftershock kicks in. They sip water, wipe bird-shreds off their clothes, and stare at the floor or walk in tiny circles. As their bodies and systems start to recover, they chat quietly and nervously in small groups, acting like nothing so much as a group of folks who just found out that they were the last ones to successfully ride a roller coaster before it flew off its tracks and into the side of a mountain.

Eventually, though, grins start to appear and a sense of happy survival takes hold — though perhaps in prescient acknowledgement that Chestnut would inevitably triumph.

Indeed, Chestnut holds most of the food eating records in the world, for such items as Krystal Hamburgers (103 in eight minutes); 20 8-ounce corned beef sandwiches in 10 minutes; 2.125 gallons of chili in six minutes, and 12 pounds, 8.75 ounces of deep-fried asparagus spears in 10 minutes. His list of victories is considerably more extensive and involves a vast array of food types.

“For this, I had to learn how to cook a turkey because it’s a different type of contest,” Chestnut said after accepting his check. “You’ve got to be able to eat a turkey to work on your technique, so I had to get good at cooking one.”

The Foxwoods World Turkey-Eating Championship was obviously time-pegged to fit with Thanksgiving and, in the spirit of the holiday, the casino donated 150 turkeys to food banks in the area. Chestnut was on hand Friday to help present the turkeys and talk about the importance of supporting local initiatives against hunger.

“We actually try to do quite a bit of charitable and community events,” said Jason “Crazy Legs” Conti, a New York City-based competitor who holds word records in buffet food eating and French-cut green-bean eating. He’d just arrived in the ballroom prior to the competition. “For example, I’ve been honored to visit our troops as a member of Major League Eating. We’ve been to Gitmo and bases in Italy, Greece

, Guam, South Korea ... It’s pretty amazing to see the cost of freedom up close, and I think we were able to help them have fun and loosen up a bit.”

Conti made the trip down from Manhattan with friend and fellow competitor Yasir Salem, whose hobby of running marathons and doing Ironman-distance triathlons is perhaps unusual for the competitive-eating business. In fact, today he’s running the Philadelphia Marathon and said he considered the turkey-eating just another way of carbo-loading.

Richard Shea, the president and one of the co-founders of Major League Eating, said they were delighted to have Foxwoods onboard as an events sponsor and hopes Saturday marked the first of what will be a long tradition. “This certainly excited our eaters,” said Shea, who emceed while wearing a Bing Crosby-style strawboater. “This is the highest per capita number of ranked eaters since Nathan’s Fourth of July event. And why not? The turkeys were roasted by Foxwoods executive chefs, and it’s hard to argue with that.”

As for whether Chestnut will actually look forward to Thanksgiving, he said, “Oh, definitely. I’d better. I think my mom would be pretty unhappy if I didn’t eat her turkey. But that’s OK. Who doesn’t like turkey?”

Is there any type of food Chestnut won’t eat in a competition?

“Oysters,” he said, shaking his head. “Oysters are just gross.”

That news is OK with his fellow professionals, though. “Jaws wins a lot,” said Conti, who once ate 34 dozen oysters on the half-shell in three hours at the Acme Oyster House in New Orleans. “If he doesn’t want to eat oysters, that’s OK. I can eat some oysters.”

r.koster@theday.com

Twitter: @rickkoster