#gavage

Foie gras (goose and duck liver) produced through gavage, or force-feeding. Specifically, about the politics of it in California.

Even my strong-stomached man who has no problem with most forms of animal use was like "...that is just too much" (he was the one who wanted to watch it, I was already pretty sure what I thought and this film only strengthened that).

It is a balanced documentary, even though both sides are often lacking in argument*. They show us undercover footage from farms, as well as the filmmaker going to a farm in France, pretty much the best he could find (they say their animals are roaming loose in the sun all the time, but then why are there so many stalls indoors?).

Just look at the liver of a healthy bird, versus one that has been force-fed.

They are not only massive, like the size of the entire bird (pressing on their other organs), they are always pale yellow, while any normal liver should be a healthy dark red. The color is even named from the organ, "liver".

And they live like this:

What a lovely life.

And no way do I believe that what I saw towards the end of the film, of the "lovely farm", was not propaganda. They knew they were being filmed, I'm sure they took their time to feed the bird as slowly and calmly as possible, for show. Then when it gags and spits out food, the farmer laughs, as if it's all fun and game, and the bird likes it. Propaganda if I ever saw it.

Pro tip: If you have to force them, they don't want it!

There are ethical concerns with dairy, for example. But the cows aren't put in pain when being milked, in fact many of them go into the automatic milking machine when they are empty, just to get a "nipple massage".

This is nothing of the sort. They have a massive tube pushed all the way down into their crop and an unnatural amount of food (that they would never eat voluntarily, thus the force-part of force-feeding), every day.

And I don't know much about geese, but it's absolute cruelty to deprive a duck of water. Not just the tiny cages where they literally cannot move (not all farms look like that, some have small stalls where 10-20 birds are crammed together and they have some walking space), but to deny them swimming, diving and normal behavior for a duck is absolute heartless cruelty.

It's like denying a horse to run, a pig to wallow, or an intelligent, social animal being isolated from interaction and mental stimulation. In fact even worse than that. It's like leaving a seal on dry land for its entire life. Sure it will survive, it won't dry out or be crushed under its own weight like a dolphin, but it will be absolutely miserable.

Fur farms do the same with mink. Watch this pet mink (born at a fur farm) experiencing water for the first time:

Sheer joy. And he doesn't know why, but it feels right to him, because it's instinct, what evolution programmed his species to enjoy. Without it, they're deprived. And his relatives are living their entire (thankfully, not too long) lives in places like this:

That is complete deprivation. All they have is oxygen and food. As if they are some kind of machine that needs nothing but gas, and can't feel. Walking on wire, barely any space to move, no water, no grass, no dirt, no enrichment, no "real" food, just wet paste dumped on the cage roof. All for a product we don't need. (I'm okay with fur in itself, I'm not okay with industrial fur farming.)

And foie gras is exactly the same, except it adds the extra! cruelty of force-feeding straight down their crop, which for those who don’t know is the bird's "pre-stomach" which hangs off the base of its neck. An oversized, diseased, fatty liver is not something we need.

*I said both sides have bad arguments, because this is something that bugs me a lot. We have the producers and consumers of a product (be it a particular kind of meat, fur, whatever) going:

"But this is our tradition! We've always done this! It goes back since the beginning of time, and we love it! We're very proud of our business!"

Then in comes the animal rights activists, who yell, scream, hurl personal insults and death threats, and take to downright terrorism, because in their world, two wrongs make one right, or "animal abusers are fair game", with no desire for productive discussion. And at best (putting aside the terrorists and angry spit-screaming protesters), they shove emotional propaganda on the public.

I want productive discussion. I have gone a little here, a little there in my thoughts on animal use and killing over the past few years (it's quite obvious for those who read this blog back to 2014, and it goes back even further than that).

And there are those who disagree with me strongly, but who I can still respect because I can see that they put some real thought into their position.