Reply #48: Horrible. HORRIBLE & a far cry from the farms I saw in France!

[Tinoire]

I love foie gras. Loved visiting the French countryside and seeing the duck/goose farms from the rood. I buy it in/from France often but after seeing those photos I'm going to have a hard time eating it. I know I defintely won't be eating any American foie gras. Our meat/poultry/dairy industry is unacceptably cruel- IT CAN BE DONE differently!

Now though, I'm off to research what PETA has to say about the French Foie Gras industry. Apparently they're *only* forcefed for the last 10 days of their lives.

Good lord. Pretty soon DU is going to make me cave in to my sconscience & turn me into a full vegan.

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(excerpt)

One animal rights group has made a film of what it calls the horrors of the force-feeding room and is trying to educate the French public about what the geese and ducks go through to produce foie gras. Dominique Hoffpower is a member of the group.



"They are kept in individual cages for about 10 days," said Hoffpower. "They are force-fed with a tube, twice a day into their throats, about two pounds of corn per day. And that makes their liver swell to about eight times its normal size so they can't breathe, they don't sleep anymore and some of them die before the end. That's what foie gras is."



Born to gorge?



But as he force-fed his ducks, St. Blancard, insisted that the animals do not suffer: Foie gras was first discovered by the ancient Egyptians, he said, adding that making it only exploits the migrating waterfowl’s natural ability to gorge themselves and store the excess fat in their livers before long flights.

"We do everything for the ducks to be comfortable," he said. "They always have clean water and fresh air. Yes, they have to digest intensively, that's true and we can't deny it. But they're not sick. It's like a sporting challenge for them. We do not hurt the birds because if they are unwell they can not produce a nice liver."


But St. Blancard admited that large, industrial producers may not take as much care with their birds.

While animal activists so far have not driven any foie gras producers out of business in France, European Union regulations may. The EU has demanded that the cages widely used by French farmers be replaced by larger ones so that the birds can move freely, for example.

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1553359,00.html