Foie Gras........ Please Read!

I read this in vegnews awhile back it shocked me so much that I thought I would share it with everyone.

Headline: Activists expose cruelty behind Foie Gras.

Every year in the united states nearly half a million ducks are confined, tortured, and slaughtered for their livers. Their livers are then packed and sold as a gourmet food known as Foie Gras. Foie Gras- french for fatty liver- is the liver of a duck that has been grossly enlarged threw cruel forced- feeding. In medical terms this " delicacy" is known as the disease Hepatic Lipidosis.
Many people believe Foie Gras is produced only in Europe; but inside the giant sheds of thier factory farms to United States' companies- Hudson Valley Foie Gras in New York, and Sonoma Foie Gras in California- Inflict this torture on thousands of ducks daily.
In the summer of 2002. A coalitition of animal protection groups requested tours of these facilities. No responses ever came. This led determined animal advocates to begin an investigation into both U.S. Foie Gras producers, fully documenting what goes on behind their closed doors. The investigators spent a year bringing to light the cruelty and abuse of Foie Gras production, then went public to expose the truth about the U.S. Foie Gras industry.
Hudson Valley Foie Gras, the larger and older of the two domestic producers, is responsible for eighty percent of the U.S. Foie Gras industry.The corperation is a successor to Commonwealth Enterprises, a Foie Gras factory farm who's cruelty was exposed PETA a decade ago sadly, conditions in which Foie Gras ducks suffer have only gotten worse threwout the last ten years.
The stench of feces and death is overpowering even before entering the factory farms. Once inside, the stale fowl air becomes thick, hot, and difficult to breathe.
As investigators ventured into the sheds, they encountered tens of thousands of ducks crammed into filthy crouded pens. In these pens, birds too weak to stand are trampled by thier cell mates or left to languish next to corpses. Investigaters documented ducks who could not support thier own weight as they struggled to move themselves from one end of thier small pen to the other. Volnurable in the pens investigaters witnessed two ducks being eaten alive by a rat, too weak to defend themselves. MAny other birds with similar wounds were also ducumented.
At Hudson Valley Foie Gras, ducks are increasingly being remove from these horrible cooonditions and being placed into even more despicable surroundings. The industry giant has been confining thier ducks in tiny isolation cages so small the animals can barely move, much less spread thier wings or turn around. These isolation cages are one of the most extreme examples of confinement in factory farming.
In the cages of Hudson Valley, investigators found many birds with gaping wounds on thier wings where thier obese bodies chafed against the sides of thier cages. Similarly, investigators documented many ducks who had injured and bloodied thier beaks by slamming them against bars of thier cages as they struggled to move thier necks.
Kept immobile, the already suffering birds developed foot infections and bone deformations that leave them in constant pain also at Hudson Valley, investigators found birds covered in thier own blood and vomit. The bars of the isolation cages at Hudson Valley Foie Gras are often stained red with blood.
Confinment, stress, and infection also lead to neurological problems on Foie Gras factory farms. In the pens, many ducks pace incessantly while in the isolation cages, they merely shake thier heads for hours at a time. Some are so neaurlogicaly damaged that they cannot hold thier heads up.
Investogaters also ducumented the forced feeding process at Hudson Valley Foie Gras and Sonoma Foie Gras. Forced- feeding begins when the ducks are just three months old. From that point on, the ducks have a long metal pipe shoved down their throats three times a day. Each worker is responsible for forced-feeding over a hundred birds. Grabing the weakened, struggling duck by the neck, the worker pries the ducks beak open and thrusts the long metal pipe deep into his or her throat. The process is so inherently rough, and the workers so careless, that the pipe often ripes through the ducks throat tearing open the esophagus and neck. Further, the quantity of food pumped into these ducks, up to a tenth of the birds body weight, is vastly more then the birds would ever consume on thier own. Investigators found corpses of ducks who had sufficated during forced feeding, or whose organs had exploded from the violent over-feeding.
Exacerbating these tottures, all ducks kept for Foie Gras production suffer from a lack of access to water. Although it is crucial to a ducks life, on the factory farm water is almost non- existant. During trips to the farms in the winter, Investigators found that what little water the ducks have often freezes. Even when not frozen, the water is so limited that the ducks cannot clear the mucous from the nostril-like holes on thier beaks. This often leads to infections, blindness and death.
Inside the sheds, APRL and Gourmetcruelty.com investigators frequently found birds with only gaping holes where thier eyes once were.
As many ducks cannot survive this constant deprivation, confinement, and torture, dead birds were a common sight on both farms. Corpses lay everywhere, trash bins filled with the discarded corpses of ducks who could not survive the torture were everywhere at Sonoma Foie Gras. sad testament to the trauma and suffering of the 500,000 ducks exploited annually by the foie gras industry.
Each day, tens of thousands of ducks kept prisoner for foie gras production have these tortures inflicted upon them. However we CAN help. A proposed New York state bill to ban the forced feeding of birds for food is foundering in the states committe please write to:
The Agricultural Committe of the New York State Senate
State Capital Building
Albany, NY 12207
Comanding them for thier courage in considering this measure, and asking them to bring S- 5153 to the floor.
And please, let people know why you wont eat Foie Gras.
Thank you for taking the time to read this*

 

You know, I always read about foie gras but never saw it anywhere. I guess this is part of living in a poor area. But a couple years ago, I went to Pittsburgh and stayed in a better hotel, and they provided menus to upscale restaurants. "Milk-fed" (read: crated) veal and foie gras were all over the place.
You have to wonder what kind of minds it comes to come up with this..."let's force feed a duck until its liver swells to a grotesque size, then churn it into mush and put it on crackers!"

 

I know, I don't get it either. I don't understand how anyone could come up with the cruelest ideas for animals.

 

I know I'm sorry, I actually read that it wasn't allowed after I did it. again I'm sorry.