Cheap foie gras burgers in France for Christmas(goose related item)

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That guy is pretty out there. I think though, that most of the 'out there' foods in the world, originally were about making do with what one has, rather than going hungry. I know that snails, frogs and things like that were considered something only starving peasants would eat, at least at some point in the past.
 
The whole concept of forcing an animal to consume excess amounts of food just so we can eat an exceptionally fatty liver (which we do not need to eat in the first place) IMHO is rather cruel. I have done my research on this, and did note that the birds are 'allowed' to graze for a certain period of their life and that after that time they are segregated into penned areas for the remainder of their lifetime for the force feedings. The 'farming' method here in the States is much more humane than the methods of some farms in Europe, I still do not see the value of this practice. These birds will not willingly on their own consume the amounts of food needed to produce the overly large livers. They still need to be force fed.

Food for thought; the normal size of a goose liver is 100 grams, the foie gras goose liver is up to 800 grams. There is no way that bird is comfortable having all of its organs squished by an abnormally large liver. Being a prey animal, the bird would hide discomfort or illness up until the very last.




I am surprised that there are not more on this board who think this is inhumane treatment. The other foods mentioned have all been from animals who have been allowed to live normal lives without the intervention from us.

Ok, I'll get off my soapbox now. This is just something that really bugs me. Heck, Wolfgang Puck does not even serve the stuff!
 
Is it possible to produce foie gras without cruelty. One farm actually had Temple Grandin come in and inspect the farm. Temple Grandin is an autistic person who has come to be viewed as an animal expert, especially in managing meat animals humanely.

There are several farms here and in Europe, that do not force feed the foie gras ducks or geese at all, actually. Do not force feed them at all. No force feeding. They offer different feeds, and evidently, the ducks and geese just gobble it up.

I do know, that if I fed my chickens a very rich diet, they'd eat all I'd give. They seem to go after the richest feed - high in fat and calories, such as bugs and seeds. So I do think it's possible to feed birds a rich diet and they will eat it up pretty much without limit.

It's also a little odd to watch a video of them feeding the foie gras ducks. I did not expect this at all, but they clamor around for their feeding. That surprised me. I expected from the internet accounts, that it was a painful, horrible process that the animals struggled against. Yet, the ducks crowd around the feeder. The feeding takes about a second for each duck.

But the fact that the ducks are willing participants, isn't going to justify it for everyone. As a general ethical argument, the willingness of the animal to perform any act, well, it has shortcomings. For example, horses were willing to dive off a diving board into a pool, too, but it was still regarded as inhumane by many.

Nor am I sure any longer, that I'd want to eat foie gras produced by force feeding, especially if it can be produced without forced feeding. It is a meat animal, and the rest of the animal is eaten as well.

Frankly, if they are so eager to eat the food, I am not exactly sure why it needs to be fed with the tube feeder. Tradition? Maybe it's to avoid having any of the more costly food wasted or trampled into the floor? I have also seen on some of the older farms, the feed is put in the animal's mouth by hand, rather than with a feeding tube, which seems less prone to accident.s
 
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There are periods of time when a goose/duck will eat more than normal; right before they would migrate, this would cause the liver to enlarge, but NOT to the extent that the force feeding does.

Could you provide links or articles on these farms that have found a breed of duck or goose that will willingly engorge itself like this? I would love to investigate further.
 
I am not an advocate for any method of producing foie gras - the reason for posting was more to ask if others like any unusual treats - if you want further information, I'm sure a few quick google searches will turn it up...besides, I don't want to get in a debate with Kate Winslet, LOL.

There are farms that do this without force feeding, I know that, and I know that they use a variety of breeds, I think it is more about timing and what the animal is offered, than breed, and I'm not sure if the results are exactly the same, but you can take it from there.
 
I was thinking more of backing up your statements. I did do searches before I posted and could not find much if anything for information on what you are referring to.

As far as I have found; Temple Grandin has never visited a foie gras farm, she advised someone else who was making the visit. She herself is opposed to it.
 
"backing up your statements"

I don't know which statements you are referring to. It's hard to 'back up' opinions, especially when I don't have one. I'm new to this subject. As far as 'backing up' .... ??? but....

A farm video I saw, said she had visited their farm...I can find it again, I think that particular farm is in upstate NY. I went looking for the farm that does not force feed, and found that one instead, I was surprised to hear that Grandin had inspected THAT farm, as I didn't think she'd be in favor of force feeding in general, just based on having read her articles and hearing her speak. I certainly could have misheard and they said she was GOING to inspect their farm...but as far as I can remember, they said she HAD.

So perhaps the video was telling a....um... 'a not so very completely true statement' or as someone (another situation) told me he had 'indeed made a statement that became untrue, but was, not at that time, entirely untrue as of yet'. .... Okaaaay....

Where did you hear that Grandin had not visited that farm? I read in one article she had not visited one farm - but she did not say that she would not visit it, only that she hadn't. She also didn't say she was against foie gras production, but she did give a list of criteria to check on the farm (she spoke by phone to the journalist that wrote the article):

"Grandin cautioned that she hadn't been to a foie gras farm herself, but she would say that "ducks and geese will do a certain amount of gorging-that's natural." She explained that the birds prepare for migration by storing fat in their livers and beneath their skin. "An enlarged liver is not necessarily sick, but it's a matter of how far you push it. Are you overloading the birds' biology to the point where it falls apart? Is the duck so big and distorted that it can hardly walk?" She mentioned that birds do not have a gag reflex as humans do, but that the handlers must be careful not to hurt the birds' esophagi with the feeding tube.

Check for bright eyes, clean feathers, foot conditions, and the level of the smell of ammonia in the barn, she said. The birds won't be hungry, so they wouldn't flock to the feeders, but I should watch to see if they tolerate the feeding or try to get away. And if they do show aversion, I should try to figure out if it's because they don't want to be handled or don't want to be fed.

Both Grandin and Cheever agreed that it was important that I see the ducks in the later stages of force-feeding-if any ducks were sick, it would be these. But Cheever was convinced that the farm wouldn't show me those birds.
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The article continues:

"We met up with Henley and started to look around. The first thing I noticed was the lack of tiny cages. Hudson Valley raises its ducks in free-feeding barns until they're 12 weeks old. After that, the birds are moved to the force-feeding barns, but instead of being put into individual cages, they're housed in relatively spacious, open-topped group pens about the size of an office cubicle. In fact, none of the four foie gras farms in the United States currently uses the individual cages that have shown up in industrial farms in Canada and France. Hudson Valley's products are certified "cage-free."

Henley then took me to watch the oldest ducks get loaded into a rolling cart bound for the slaughter room. They waddled to the front of their pens and regarded us curiously. The birds that finished their feeding regime yesterday were the ones being loaded up for the big goodbye, while the others, who were on day 21 that day, were being fed.

The room is lined with four rows of pens that run lengthwise down the barn. There were 11 ducks in each four-by-six-foot pen, which are raised about a foot off the ground; wire mesh forms the floors of the pens, so that duck waste can fall through it into the channel beneath. The place smelled funky, and faintly of ammonia, but not overwhelmingly so. So far, the sights could not have been more different from the horrifying images I'd seen on the Internet".

and on....

"Henley said that he'd been making some changes on the farm with the help of animal-welfare consultants, including Dr. Ericka Voogd (a colleague of Grandin's) and Dr. Tirath Sandhu, an avian scientist who is retired from the Cornell Veterinary School. One of the alterations could be found in the nurseries, our next stop.

This nursery held four-day-old chicks and smelled woodsy from the fluffy sawdust bedding covering the floor. The flock of yellow babies cheeped and toddled around the warm room. Until recently, the chicks lived on just one level of sawdust, but moisture from their drinking water would drip down into the bedding. At the prompting of the welfare consultants, the farm installed a wire-mesh ramp on one side of the room, leading up to a level wire-mesh floor, where the water nipples are now located. Moisture drips down through the mesh, and the bedding stays dry. Plus, said Henley, "it adds a level of complexity to their environment."


...then took us through a door into a similar room, which held nine-week-olds that looked nearly full-grown. The mass of feathers moved as one, scampering away from us as we entered the room. "You have to move slowly, or they'll stampede," Henley told us. We walked slowly out into the center of the room, and it was like parting the sea-but a sea of ducks.

Once the birds hit 12 weeks, they're moved from the growing areas&-;where they waddle around freely and have windows for natural light-to the group pens, where the 21-day force-feeding begins and the room is lit artificially. (It does seem like a step down in living arrangements.)

We headed back to the buildings where the feeding was taking place. A worker climbed into the pen with a stool and a wooden divider. (Each worker has a group of 320 to 350 ducks that he or she feeds every day during the 21-day regimen; workers whose ducks have low mortality rates and high-quality livers get bonuses.) A tube with a funnel at the top was strung from a wire above, and the worker slid it along into the pen she was about to work in. The birds clustered on one side of the pen, but didn't show nearly as much aversion to humans as the nine-week-olds we had just seen did-the older ducks seemed less alarmed by humans, which is hard to reconcile with if they were being tortured.

The woman sat on the stool, put the wooden divider in the middle of the pen, and reached for the first bird. She positioned the bird's body under her leg, eased the tube down the bird's throat, and poured a cupful of feed into the funnel above. A rotating auger spins in the funnel to make sure all of it goes down the pipe, but the food is delivered by gravity. The birds did not relish being grabbed, but the actual process with the tube didn't seem to bother them much. They sat with the tube down their throat for a very short period of time-about 10 to 15 seconds-without struggling or showing sign of distress. The whole process-pick up, position, feed, and release-took about 30 seconds. I watched the birds closely as they walked away from the feeding. Each waddled calmly away, looking unfazed: no breathing problems, no vomiting, and no trouble walking. Their feathers were fairly clean, and I didn't see any lesions on their feet or bodies.

But these ducks were only on their 12th day of force-feeding, so I asked to see the ducks on their 21st day again-this time, to pay more attention to the details of the feeding. We went back up to the area where we had started from. Some of the cages that were full when we saw them earlier were now half-empty, because some ducks actually go to slaughter earlier than the 22nd day. The feeder feels the base of each duck's esophagus (sometimes called a "pseudo-crop"), where feed is held that has yet to be digested. Birds that haven't digested the last feeding are marked with blue chalk and not fed. If they still haven't digested by the next feeding, they're not fed yet again and are marked with pink chalk and taken with the next batch to be slaughtered.

The birds on their 21st day of feeding appeared very much like the ones at 12 days, but were fatter and had dirtier feathers. The birds are bathed on the second and 10th days of feeding, but Henley said the farm was working with its animal-welfare consultants to find a way to keep the birds' feathers cleaner and thus prevent sores. These birds' reactions to the force-feeding were indistinguishable from those of the 12th-day birds. I looked for the signs that I'd been told would show me that the birds were desperately ill, but these birds, on their 21st day, were not having trouble walking or breathing, they weren't having seizures, and they weren't comatose.

I was at the farm for five hours, all told. I saw thousands of ducks, but not a drop of duck vomit. I didn't see an animal that was having a hard time breathing or walking, or a duck with a bloodied beak or blown-open esophagus. I did see one dead duck. And now I was going to see many more, as I went to the area where they are slaughtered.
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This article refers to TWO people - Grandin and Cheever. Cheever is the person absolutely against foie gras. Grandin did not say one way or another for or against in this article, she only gave criteria to check the ducks by. Further, the farm used a colleague of Grandin's, rather than Grandin. So the video may have been made some time ago, and more likely Grandin too busy to go than protesting and refusing to go, she discusses it extensively in this article and never registers an opinion for or against.


The last time I saw it done, was a little old lady in a barnyard, and she put the duck on her lap and put some food in its mouth. But that was rather a long time ago.
 
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