Videos show horror behind foie gras
Discarded chicks being crushed or burned draws new criticism of foie gras at Christmas time
TWO videos showing the treatment of birds in the foie gras making process have been posted online by an animal rights group.
Instead of the well-documented force-feeding processes, animal rights campaigners have gone behind the scenes of how the geese are bred.
The videos include footage of female chicks being thrown down waste chutes to be crushed.
Animal rights group L214, which lobbies for an end to foie gras production, has published the two videos.
The first, taken at a hatchery for goslings in the Pays-de-la-Loire, shows females being sorted and thrown to violent brutal deaths as their livers will not grow large enough to make foie gras efficiently.
The males are thrown into a machine where their beaks are sliced off by a white hot metal blade, so they cannot attack each other.
A second video also shows a step further back in the foie gras chain in a goose farm in the south west where the animals are artificially inseminated to produce eggs for the hatchery.
It shows a bird still alive despite having its neck dislocated and other exhausted females, while the males are kept in small cages.
A spokesperson for L214 Brigitte Gothière said the videos “lifted the veil on a process that had a lot to hide”.
Nothing shown in the latest videos is illegal in French law. However, the group has previously insisted that 85% of foie gras produced in France is illegal under EU law because of the cages used.
A deadline of January 1, 2016 has been set for France - one of only five countries in the EU still making foie gras - to bring its methods in line with European animal rights legislation, however Le Monde reports that only 85% of farmers have done so.
L214 has previously released videos of the forced feeding of geese to make foie gras and in the summer shocked the country with video of male chicks being crushed or suffocated.
See also: ’Stop the massacre of male chicks’
A poll taken in December by YouGov for L214 found 51% of French people supported a ban on forced feeding, up four points on 2014. Furthermore, 33% refused to buy it on ethical grounds.
However another poll taken in 2014 found that 80% said that foie gras was an indispensable part of the festive season.
