Foie gras controversy

The production of foie gras (the liver of a duck or a goose that has been specially fattened) involves the controversial force-feeding of birds with more food than they would eat in the wild, and more than they would voluntarily eat domestically. The feed, usually corn boiled with fat (to facilitate ingestion), deposits large amounts of fat in the liver, thereby producing the fatty consistency sought by some gastronomes.

Animal rights and welfare activist groups such as the Humane Society of the United States and the Animal Legal Defense Fund contend that foie gras production methods, and force feeding in particular, consist of cruel and inhumane treatment of animals. Specific complaints include livers swollen to many times their normal size, impaired liver function, expansion of the abdomen making it difficult for birds to walk, death if the force feeding is continued, and scarring of the esophagus.

In modern gavage-based foie gras production, force feeding takes place 12–18 days before slaughter.

In 2001, the Director of the New York State Government Affairs & Public Policy Dept. for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which is one of America's leading environmental activist groups, wrote a letter to then NYS Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, asking that the state's foie gras producers be prosecuted for violating animal cruelty statutes.

Late in 2003, the French group Stopgavage ("Citizens' Initiative for the banning of force-feeding") published the Proclamation for the Abolition of Force Feeding, which asks justices to find foie gras production practices a violation of existing animal welfare laws. For this manifesto Stopgavage claims the support of over eighty French animal rights and welfare associations, over a hundred such associations from 25 other countries, and over 20 thousand individual signatories.

Stopgavage, through its president Antoine Comiti, has criticized the INRA (a French public research institute) for allowing its researchers to receive grants from the foie gras industry for conducting research aimed at contradicting the EU report conclusions. Robert Dantzer, a retired INRA researcher, calls the INRA studies "pseudoscience" and "convenience research".

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Wikipedia