life gras on...

i found this article today regarding the production of foie gras in america.

it provides a great deal of insight into what many activists (read: maniacal terrorists) claim to be extremely inhumane. 

more on this from me, later...

***UPDATE***

Youve seen it all over the news, read about it in the paper, the internet, heard about it on radio talk shows: foie gras = cruelty. Ducks/geese are held in industrial cages, not free to roam and are plagued by disease, wallowing in their own filth. The force-feeding, or gavage (a process wherein a large tube is shoved down the ducks throat and a small amount or corn/grain based feed is milled through), causes the animals great discomfort and tears their esophagus. It causes immense stress on the beaks causing them to break, the ducks and geese become so engorged that they can no longer stand or walk, vomiting all over themselves. Their diseased bodies give out on them and they die.

Yes, that does sound cruel. And hell, if it happened on every foie farm I might join the fight as well. The fact of the matter is, there are plenty of farms that do not practice their husbandry this way. There have even been veterinarians who have visited Hudson Valley and Sonoma Farms (one of which even wrote a letter to the CA senate regarding the ban on foie gras and her visit to Sonoma) and have found nothing inhumane about them. The owners of the farms even welcome chefs and reporters to come and take pictures UNANNOUNCED!!! If there was something to hide, I think that they would be the biggest fools of all to be opening themselves up like that.

Don’t mince my words, now, as there are plenty of farms that are treating their animals extremely cruelly: These are the farms that need to be dealt with. There should be a radical adjustment to the way that these farms do business. This is where people should be protesting and government stepping in, not ruining it for those who are doing it right.

Animal rights extremists terrorizing restaurants and their patrons, chefs and their families (forcing some of them to go into hiding because of threats that have been made on their lives). I think that these people are the people who should be fought against. These are the people against whom war needs to be waged. Its funny to me the stereotypes of the two classes: the weak, pallid vegetarians and the strong, burly carnivores. Funny because those that some perceive to be almost immobile due to malnutrition are the ones who are out fighting and creating chaos for those who are doing nothing more than providing a service for people to enjoy something delicious.

I have never once heard of a meat-eater video taping people in their homes and threatening their families, or throwing buckets of rotten vegetation through the windows of raw bars or vegetarian friendly restaurants. So why is the opposite true? I saw another post on the site of the SF based restaurant Incanto, where they were recently told that they had to take the foie gras off of their menu. The response is half plea, and half come-and-get-us. A very well-informed letter that, at once, takes a calm, eloquent, and fired-up approach to those out there who would rather make people suffer for something that they think is right.

As for me, until I hear word of Goventator Swarzenweizenheimer lifting the upcoming ban, I am going to be buying the shit out of that stuff...