The No Foie Gras SA campaign is affialted to BWC. The website www.nfgsa.co.za has much information, well known South African supporters of the campaign, the Wall of Shame and a downloadable pledge.
Imagine you’ve just eaten an enormous lunch. So enormous that you can hardly move. In fact, you are finding it difficult to breathe. You feel bloated, swollen and in agony. “Why did I do it?, you ask yourself. “Never again!” Now imagine you didn’t have the choice. What if, like the non migratory birds (who therefore do not usually gorge to carbo load for flight) used to produce foie gras, you are caged so you cannot move, you were forced to repeat the process time and time again? What if, for the next 16 days, at regular – all too short – intervals, somebody pushed a rigid metal tube down your throat and filled your stomach with food. The pain, discomfort and utter misery you would feel can only be imagined.
Foie Gras is not only about pitying the millions of birds that suffer and die, many from suffocation and lacerations of the throat or suffocation, before slaughter. It is also about having our own dignity, recognizing the dignity, sentience and the right to live their own lives of other beings and also being conscious of the terrible human cost that is part of the price paid when making, buying or eating Foie Gras.
For example, one bird is forced to consume between 160 and 210 kgs of corn mush in only three weeks. This is the equivalent of a 68kg human consuming roughly 27kgs of oiled pasta daily, or 54 boxes of pasta a day. (Ref: USA Animal Protection & Rescue League) Sound absurd? But this is precisely what happens. The issue of Foie Gras is not to the exclusion of others, such as circus animals, factory farms, puppy mills, the homeless or disenfranchised, AIDS or anything else, it simply that Foie Gras defines the worst excesses of human greed and self indulgence of the few for fleeting taste, regardless who may suffer.
40 million birds suffer and die annually on Foie Gras farms. Can you imagine how many starving humans could be fed with more than 840 million kgs of food each year?
There are those who would argue that ‘cruelty free’ naturally raised birds are also used for Foie Gras – but like blood diamonds, how do you know the origin? Can you be sure of the integrity of the supplier, or the knowledge of the supplier?
For many reasons, we should refrain from importing, buying, supplying and eating this socially irresponsible and cruel product.