Controversy over foie gras: California bans the stuff

An uncut foie gras liver. Photo: David Monniaux.
Used under Creative Commons Atrribution-ShareAlike license.

Foie gras will be illegal in the state of California as of July 1, 2012. The ban is a major milestone for animal-rights activists, and for anyone who cares about animal suffering. Foie gras is the fatty and grossly-enlarged liver of geese or ducks, an expensive “gourmet” meat created by force-feeding the birds.

It’s my understanding that California will be the first U.S. state to outlaw the sale and the production of foie gras. A number of European countries, as well as Israel and Argentina, have already banned it. The city of Chicago did so in August of 2006, but the ban only lasted two years before the city council overturned it, under pressure from restaurant owners and then-Mayor Daley.

In banning this meat considered a delicacy, the California state legislature apparently acted out of concern for animal cruelty. The ban was requested by a coalition of animal-protection organizations including the Association of Veterinarians for Animal Rights, Farm Sanctuary, Los Angeles Lawyers for Animals, and Viva!USA. Sales of foie gras are way up in California at present, as diners fond of fatty livers make merry while they can.

Kate Winslet exposes foie gras farms on this video

No one disputes that force-feeding geese and ducks up to 4 lbs of grain and fat per day through a tube pushed down their throats is unpleasant and dangerous for the birds. Perhaps “cruel” would be a better word. Yet, feeding is just one piece of the picture. Between feedings, the birds are not swimming around a pond or frolicking through the grass to shake off the bad experience. On large-scale foie gras farms, each duck is confined permanently to a cage that hugs its body, unable to groom itself or even turn around. Only their heads and necks protrude from the long rows of battery cages, so that staff inserting the feeding tubes 3 times a day can move along the rows quickly. Check out this video of Kate Winslet narrating undercover footage of the feeding and housing of foie gras birds.

Under this regimen, the birds’ fat-laced livers grow so large that the animals are eventually unable to move or to breathe normally. The livers are prized as a delicacy because of their fatty, “buttery” taste.

Workers, consumers victimized too

I have not visited a foie gras farm. I have however inspected a Food Lion egg factory (over a million caged hens in one facility), a massive Tyson broiler farm (chickens), a Tyson breeder farm, and a factory hog farm – all of which are described in detail in our book Veggie Revolution.
Animals are not the only victims in these dismal places. We also interviewed farm-owners and workers – none of them were happy working under contract to meatpacking companies whose guiding ethic is shaving pennies from production costs. Worker safety, consumer safety, animal welfare, and environmental safeguards all take a back seat to shareholder profits for the meatpacking corporations that are calling the shots.

Laborers on factory farms and in meatpacking plants, including foie-gras farms, are paid minimal wages and are often illegal immigrants too vulnerable to object to exploitive and dangerous working conditions. Usually working under a quota of animals or carcasses processed per minute, they are forced to rush through procedures such as force-feeding of geese or ducks for foie gras. Consequently, workers often injure themselves as well as animals. The throats of the geese and ducks are often perforated and scraped as the tube is pushed into place for each feeding.

Fois gras a small market, can lead to bigger victories later

In reality, the plight of foie gras birds is not particularly worse than that of most factory-farmed animals. Foie gras has been targeted by animal-rights activists because it’s a relatively small market that is more vulnerable to change than more broadly entrenched practices. Banning foie gras is a far more achievable goal than, say, demanding that beef cattle no longer be fed the corn that marbles their meat and speeds their growth, maximizing profits for ranchers and meatpackers. (Corn makes cattle very sick.)

Supermarkets are customer-driven – your objection counts

What can you do? If you see foie gras for sale, tell the proprietor of the shop or restaurant that you find the sale distressing, and tell them why. They may not know much about how the liver is produced. Tell them that you won’t shop or dine there as long as they carry the product. We interviewed the manager of a large supermarket chain store about the veal they sell, for our book Veggie Revolution. He said supermarkets are purely customer-driven. They carry what customers buy, period. Sales of veal (another smallish market) have dropped dramatically in recent years due to publicity from animal rights groups, who have educated the public about what veal is exactly – it’s beef from anemic calves that are kept isolated in narrow stalls from the age of 1 day to slaughter at 4 months, often chained at the neck to keep their muscles weak and tender. Although Americans are still eating veal, demand in the U.S. dropped 62% between 1987 and 2006. As consumers learn more about foie gras, I believe its sales will drop as well. Hopefully more states will follow California’s inspiring example.

Keywords: foie gras ban animal cruelty factory farming animal products animal welfare California ban forced feeding gavage duck livers goose livers

8 Egregious Animal Abuses by the Meat Industry

This is the third post in a series about reasons to consider a vegan diet.

Earlier:
Top 5 Ways Livestock Wreck the Planet
Top 7 Health Reasons to Bypass Animal Products

While researching our books Veggie Revolution and Going Green, Sadie and I wrangled our way into several factory farms - our home state of N.C. is full of them. North Carolina has more hogs than people, and is a major poultry state too. Why? Because land is cheap, environmental laws are lax, and NC is the least unionized state. So the meat industry is free here to exploit immigrant and minority labor and pollute our rivers. Smithfield has the world's biggest hog "processing plant," in Tar Heel, NC, where 35,000 hogs per day are slaughtered. The Cape Fear River runs right by, to receive the effluent. Most states that produce a lot of animal products exclude farm animals from animal-cruelty laws. So anything that's common practice in animal farming is legal, regardless of how abusive or cruel it is. Hundreds of inhumane practices warrant comment in a post such as this. But I chose situations I witnessed while researching our books - those that had the biggest emotional impact on me.

A sow confined in a farrowing crate with her piglets. Photo: Sally Kneidel

1. Most breeding sows in the U.S. spend their lives in "gestation crates" so small they can't turn around.
The sows have no bedding, no straw, nothing to do but lie there - for 12 years. They breathe the foulest air you can imagine - after I walked through the buildings, everything I had reeked of fresh feces, including my camera. The rooms with rows of "farrowing crates" were the saddest sight, for me. Just before piglets are born, a sow is transferred from her gestation crate to a farrowing crate, where a metal bars (see photo) immobilize her and keep her teats always available to the piglets. The piglets are removed after 3 wks, then the sow is inseminated again and moved back to the gestation crate. Under pressure from animal activists, some pork producers have pledged to phase out gestation crates by 2017. But these narrow, bare crates are still the norm. Veterinarians consider pigs as smart as dogs, and without ample places to root and explore, pigs are bored to the point of insanity. Imagine keeping a dog for 12 years in a crate so small it couldn't turn around. The public wouldn't stand for it. So why do we allow it for pigs?

  5-week-old chickens in a Tyson broiler shed. Photo: Sally Kneidel

2. The Tyson broiler farm I visited had 24,000 chickens crammed into each shed.
As I entered a dimly-lit broiler shed, I felt claustrophobic - the air was so thick with feather and fecal dust that I had trouble breathing; the floor was spongy with 18 months' accumulation of feces. The chickens in the shed were crowded, but would get much more crowded after 2-3 more weeks' growth. Crowding maximizes profits by maximizing the number of birds in the expensive heated space, but also by keeping the birds immobile - inactive birds gain more weight. Tyson chickens are bred to be constantly hungry and to grow unnaturally fast, gaining 6 lbs in 7-8 weeks, most in the breast muscles (the most expensive cut). Some gain so fast their legs collapse and they starve, unable to reach the automated food and water dispensers. The farmer has to do a "walk-through" every day to pull out the dead birds. When the chickens have reached the target weight for slaughter at 7-8 weeks, a crew of Tyson "catchers" come in. Hidden cameras have shown the catchers literally throwing the live chickens into the crates (up to 5 birds per hand is allowed). For a description of the slaughter and processing of the chickens, read this excerpt from the book The Way We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason.

3. Breeder chickens must be kept hungry all the time, or their own weight will kill them.
We visited a Tyson breeder farm, which produces fertile eggs and chicks to populate the broiler sheds. The breeder or parent chickens are allowed to live for 63 weeks (much longer than broilers) because they have to reach sexual maturity, unlike the broilers. The shed we visited contained 11,500 hens and 1,200 roosters. The breeders, being older, are bigger than broilers (9 lb hens, 12 lb roosters). They looked to me just as tightly packed in the shed as the broilers were, but the farmer said they're not, because the roosters have to be able to move around to reach all the hens. As the hens lay fertile eggs in their roosting boxes, the eggs roll out of the shed by automation, then are transferred elsewhere to hatch into chicks. Since the breeders (as parents) must have the same genes for hunger and weight gain as the broilers, the breeders could all grow to fatal proportions with their longer life spans. To prevent this, the breeders are fed minimal diets and are always hungry, said the farmer. These chickens have also been bred to lay eggs with abnormal frequency, and around 10% of the hens drop dead from "blowout" - the physiological stress of egg overproduction with a minimal diet.

Laying hens at Food Lion egg factory. Photo: Sally Kneidel

4. At the Food Lion egg factory I toured, five hens were stuffed into each 18" x 20" cage.
Cages were stacked floor to ceiling, housing 1.2 million hens at the site. These hens lay "table eggs" for human consumption. Each hen, with beak clipped to prevent fighting, spends 2 years in a cage until her body is spent. "When they're done," said the manager, "we can hardly give them away." Walking up and down the aisles, I saw the hens had bare red patches and stripped feathers from trying to dust bathe on a metal grate and trying to brood missing eggs - the eggs roll onto the conveyor belt as soon as they're laid. Many had feces on their heads and shoulders from the hens stacked above them. The hens have been engineered to lay 3 times the number of eggs as a normal rural hen. If the rate of production wanes, food is withheld for several days, which forces the hens to molt, and then egg production picks up. An occasional "forced molt" is recommended by the industry to maximize production. The sheds where hens were undergoing a forced molt were very quiet. This was the worst air of all the factory farms I visited - there was a dusting of "snow" (fecal and feather dust) on everything, including me. Under the cages was an 8' ft deep trench full of hen feces. It's emptied only when the hens are replaced, every 2 years. The buildings had outdoor fans, but none were operational.

5. "A dairy cow is a milk factory. There's not much quality of life in a dairy cow,"
said the dairyman. A family dairy cow used to produce milk for 10 to 12 years, maybe live as long as 20 years. Nowadays, in the industrial-sized dairies that can house 10,000 to 18,000 cows each, a cow is generally worn out after only 3 years - her body is pushed to its limits and just gives out. In one of these mega-dairies, a cow is impregnated roughly once a year to maximize her milk production. She may also be injected every other week with BST (bovine somatotropin) to increase milk production 10% more. The continual pregnancies and abnormal milk production place a huge strain on the cow's body. The concrete floor is hard on her feet and legs, and the weight of pregnancy makes it more so. When her milk production drops too low or she has chronic leg problems or fails to become pregnant, she's slaughtered for low-grade meat. In a typical confinement dairy, a third of the herd is culled every year. What happens to the calves that result from the continuous pregnancies? Many consumers have the impression that humans take the milk the calf doesn't want. But the calves are whisked away from mom only a few hours after birth. Female calves may be raised on formula to replace the milk cows culled from the herd. Male calves may be sold at auction, or tethered alone in wooden stalls for 16 weeks, fed low-iron diets to make their flesh pale, and then slaughtered to be sold as veal. How do cows feel about losing their calves just after birth, when their systems are flooded with mothering hormones? They look for the calf and often bellow continuously, sometimes for weeks. Said Dr. Temple Grandin, "That's one sad, unhappy, upset cow. She wants her baby....it's like grieving, mourning."

6. The unnatural corn diet fed to 90% of beef cattle makes them very sick.
Cows evolved to eat grass. But corn leads to faster weight gain, so at 6-7 months of age, 80-90% of beef cattle are transitioned to an abnormal diet of up to 85% corn. At the same time, they're trucked to large feedlots; one feedlot may have as many as 200,000 steers, grouped in pens of 900 or so. The cattle spend all their time standing or lying in a gray muck of feces and urine, with access to an always-full trough of corn and food additives, until they reach slaughter weight at 12-14 months of age. Corn causes cattle stomachs to be more acidic than they should be. The industry's "Feedlot Magazine" says all corn-fed cattle develop painful "sub-acute acidosis" at some point in the feedlot. The "Beef Cattle Handbook" (for feedlot managers) says animals with sub-acute acidosis "are plagued with diarrhea, go off their feed, pant, kick at their bellies, salivate excessively, and eat dirt." This condition often leads to very painful stomach ulcers, which when perforated, lead to liver ulcers. "Acute acidosis" is generally fatal. Feedlot management is a race between erosion of the digestive system and growth to slaughter weight. An effective feedlot manager sees to it that growth wins and the animal reaches slaughter weight before it succumbs to disease. For more details about feedlot life, see Michael Pollen's article "Power Steer." For info about what goes on in cattle slaughterhouses, read Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.

7. Are fish insensitive, just because they're not mammals?
Fish are smarter than you might think. I studied the behavior of cichlid fish as a project in college, and I was astonished when I realized the school of fish that I was observing all recognized me personally.  Their tank was was in a hallway constantly full of other biology students, but when these fish saw me nearby, they all immediately came to the surface and toward me - because they knew I was the one who fed them. This was regardless of what I had in my hands. Several studies report fish intelligence, and sensitivity to pain. Dr. Culum Brown trained fish to find a hole in a net on only 5 attempts. When re-tested 11 months later, the fish remembered instantly. Dr. Lynne Sneddon showed experimentally (with bee venom and acetic acid) that rainbow trout feel pain and distress, make efforts to relieve the pain, and show relief when injected with morphine. Fish are the only vertebrate animals harvested on an industrial scale, with long-lines, gill nets, bottom trawlers, etc. Death by suffocation takes about 15 minutes; others are clubbed, pulled aboard with pickaxes, or bleed out when their gills are cut off. We treat fish as if they're vegetables, and we do it to a lot of them - humans haul in 88 million tons of fish each year just from the oceans. I haven't mentioned our decimation of fish populations - read about that here. For more about the sensitivity of fish, click here. For info about farmed fish, click here and here.

8. Foie gras - who would eat it?
Fois gras is the liver of a duck or goose that has been fattened by force-feeding it a mash of corn boiled in fat. The animal is fed far more than it would normally eat; a funnel with a long tube is used to push an excessive volume of food into the bird's esophagus 2-4 times per day. The resulting fatty liver of the bird is considered a delicacy by some, especially in France. But many investigators have reported that the birds live a miserable life: grossly overweight, immobile, with numerous damaged organs. For more info about foie gras, read here. To see a video of Kate Winslet's comments on the cruelty behind foie gras, click here.

Keywords: factory farming animal cruelty animal welfare hog farms poultry farms fish feedlots breeder farms humane farming foie gras