Force-feeding is an unpleasant and painful operation for an animal, one which is intended to make it “ill”. Industrialising foie gras production has only increased suffering.
Imagine that someone forced you to swallow 12kg of spaghetti in 5 seconds and this will give you an idea of what a duck or goose intended for foie gras production has to endure. While some people try to show that force-feeding is painless for geese and ducks, these two figures placed side by side show the opposite, if proof were needed. Many scientists and vets are protesting against these experimental approaches which try to claim that the animal feels nothing while it is force-fed. Vet Dr Yvan Beck is one of them. But it is a fact: the short lives of animals condemned to produce foie gras are full of physical suffering and illness, before death.
Illness
What ends up on our plates is a sick liver. Foie gras is actually a liver disease, a “nutritional fatty liver”, a pathological process that leads to a hepatomagalia (huge liver) which over time turns into a deadly hepatonecrosis. The animals are then slaughtered before the disease kills them. Geese and ducks can also develop secondary infections, directly caused by force-feeding, called “exit germs”, such as parasites, fungi and bacterial infections. These illnesses are treated with medication, given just before slaughter, and which leave a chemical residue in the liver. The increase in industrial farming has seen an increase in many illnesses, such as bird diseases.
Physical damage
The operation itself is not danger-free for the animal. Force-feeding may cause physical damage. This may be suffering caused by the sensory receivers in the mouth or throat injured by the tube being passed through repeatedly. Sore neck, sore crop, perforation of the oesophagus, burns caused by corn which is too hot, enlargement of the spleen and liver which press on the liver, but also suffocation when the corn accidentally enters the trachea, hypoglycaemic attacks, circulation problems, encephalohepathy, sudden death… and lesions that cause the animal to suffer when they don’t kill it. And this is without counting the massive stress on the body…
Increased suffering in farms
In industrial centres, the damages caused by force-feeding are accentuated and increased. Confinement in cages prevents their natural activities. But not just this. Deprivation from social and physiological needs lead to behavioural troubles in geese and ducks. Because the Council of Europe had seen for itself that this practice is not suited to the species that in 1999 it changed the rules managing the force-feeding and farming of animals. Even though they are still not enough, these rules have not even been adopted in French legislation. France claims a “cultural exception”.
For One Voice there is only one solution: a pure and simple ban on this practice, as is already the case in many countries in Europe and elsewhere (some states in the United States, Switzerland, Argentina, etc.). The association is carrying out its information and investigation campaigns with this objective.
Foie gras production has more than doubled since 1993. It has increased 8-fold in twenty years. Over half of foie gras consumed in France comes from abroad, from Hungary or Bulgaria.
FATTEN UP… AND DIE
Once they have reached adulthood, after a pre-feeding phase lasting around ten days intended to dilate the bird’s oesophagus (400 g/day for a duck, 700g for a goose), the force-feeding phase before death begins: 15 days for a duck and 18 to 24 for a goose. Geese receive around 900g per day in 3 to 5 sessions (rarely 5). Mulard ducks, sterile hybrids essentially produced from Barbary ducks and mallard females represent 95% of the ducks that are force-fed (only 5% are “pure” Barbary). They are fattened up with 800g every day, or even a bit more, in two sessions. Even in France, the vast majority of farms use electric or electro-pneumatic industrial systems. A mulard duck is injected with half a kilo of wet corn in five seconds! This is the equivalent of 12kg of spaghetti hitting our stomachs in 5 seconds, twice a day.
The liver is ready to be taken at the end of this period. The animal must then be slaughtered by bleeding it quickly and completely to avoid any traces of blood in the liver as this would reduce its value. But the animal cannot avoid suffering even if it is stunned by electronarcosis. The animals are hung up by their feet and plunged into a bath of electrified water. They thrash around convulsively during this phase and often afterwards until they have their throats cut.
