Back to the basics today: Meet Your Meat.
Most people don’t think of ducks and geese when they think of cruelty to farmed animals, but over 25 million ducks are slaughtered each year on factory farms. Ducks and geese are both severely abused by the meat and foie gras industries. Kept in small cages, often unable to even move, inside dirty and dark sheds, these birds often suffer from disease and injury, just as chickens and turkeys in similar conditions do.
Ducks and geese raised for foie gras (which literally means “fatty liver”) have a pipe shoved down their throats three times a day so that two pounds of grain can be pumped into their stomachs to produce this “fatty liver” that some diners consider a delicacy. Foie gras is the liver of a duck or goose who has been force fed to the point where his liver is over 10 times its normal size. Only male ducks/geese are used, and females are discarded by the industry, similar to the egg industry. (And by “discarded” I mean: killed either by being suffocated in a garbage bag or by being thrown alive into a grinder.)
Foie gras production has been deemed cruel and inhumane by experts worldwide, including the Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare. The state of California passed a law banning foie gras because of the cruelty involved. (The city of Chicago banned foie gras in 2006, then devastatingly lifted the ban in 2008.) California proudly joins a list of 15 countries that have banned this cruel practice.
Dr. Ward Stone, the senior wildlife pathologist for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, has conducted necropsies on ducks who died during force feeding at Hudson Valley Foie Gras and writes, “I eat meat including ducks on occasion. However, the short tortured lives of ducks raised for Foie Gras is well outside the norm of farm practice. Having seen the pathology that occurs from Foie Gras Production, I strongly recommend that this process be outlawed.” You can read his reports here and here.
Nearly everyone has gone to the park as a child to feed the ducks and geese. We still gaze in awe when we watch their perfectly shaped formations fly overhead. Little do we realize that these formations are strategically designed to reduce the air (or water) resistance for the birds in the rear. Ducks and geese fly hundreds of miles each year to migrate. Ducks live in close-knit family groups and geese choose a single partner and mate exclusively for life, even mourning for a significant amount of time when a partner dies.
If you want to help these fantastic birds, boycott their meat and foie gras and encourage others to do so as well.
____________________
Breakfast: Fresh fruit smoothie with 1 peach, 2 bananas, almond milk & ice
Lunch: Amy’s non-dairy baked ziti
Dinner: Spaghetti with tomato sauce
1 comment
No ping yet
Kasey says:
Friday, August 6, 2010 at 9:22 am (UTC -5)
Absolutely heartbreaking.
Secretly, I kind of hate ducks. They’re a major nuisance where I live. That the way they are tortured for meat or foie gras affects me so deeply just reinforces for me how immoral it is. I can’t see how any person of conscience could stand for this, if one who finds ducks so annoying is reduced to tears by that picture of the force-feeding.
Kasey´s last blog ..Chasing the wind again