05 January 2008

Learn to hate foie gras.



Stop Gavage exposes the foie gras industry.

Fois gras is made by force-feeding geese and male ducks, the livers of female ducks have more veins so the girls are thrown in a macerator when they hatch. The birds are force-fed enormous amounts of food, with a pneumatic pump, to make them develop a painful decease which causes the liver to become ten times larger than normal size. This deceased liver is the luxury item we desire to eat.

To make the force-feeding effective the birds are held in place by a small wire cage, with their heads protruding through a hole in the front. This makes it is easy to pull their neck straight and push a metal feeding tube down to their stomach and releasing a kilo of food in just a couple of seconds. This extreme feeding means that the birds are in severe pain and have a permanent diarrhoea. It would of course be ineffective to let the birds out, so they actually live in these cages.

A kilo is about 20 percent of the birds' normal body weight. That means it would be equivalent to shoving 15 kilos of food down the throat of an average human in just 3 seconds. It causes enormous internal pressure, and pain, and some birds literally burst. Getting a metal feeding pipe thrusted down the throat two or three times a day causes severe throat problems. Some birds' esophagus is actually punctured, leaving the bird drowning in the blood that fills its' lungs.

Choking on their own vomit is also a common cause of premature death. And some become so weak that they are unable to fend off rats from eating them alive.

Use your hate. Read the manifesto of Stop Gavage and sign it here. Stop Gavage is a French organisation working to ban foie gras in Europe.

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