Once Chicago celebrity chef Charlie Trotter announced that he
would stop serving foie gras in his restaurant because
it was produced by inhumane methods, the fight over the French
delicacy assumed a profile out of proportion to the number of
Americans who have ever tasted the food.
A group of protesters forms weekly outside New York City’s famed
Union Square Cafe to demonstrate their support for a New York
state bill that would follow California’s lead and ban foie
gras production by 2012. Last month, Chicago’s city council
banned the sale of foie gras in city restaurants and
supermarkets.
While these legislative moves reflect the animal rights
movement’s growing push to end an allegedly cruel practice,
objections to foie gras have a long history. In the
earliest example, eleventh-century French rabbis warned that Jews
who engaged in foie gras production risked unfortunate
consequences in the next world.
Today’s protesters take a more this-worldly approach. A booklet
distributed by anti-foie gras activists outside the
Union Square Cafe claims that foie gras is the “disease
tissue of a tortured, sick animal,” as well as arguing that the
animals “literally explode” from the food crammed down their
throats.
Even in France, there is increasing pressure to reexamine the
procedure. In 2003, a coalition of French animal rights groups
published a Proclamation for the Abolition of the Gavage, which
claimed that foie gras production was illegal under the
European Union’s animal protection laws.
At the center of the foie gras debate is a scientific
(and also a moral) question. Does the manner of producing
foie gras, in which large amounts of corn are placed
into the animal’s throat through a metal tube twice a day for two
weeks, in order to produce enlarged livers with exceptionally
high fat content, produce unacceptably large amounts of pain and
suffering for the animal?
The debate is an emotional one. Some opponents believe any amount
of pain for animals is unacceptable; others believe human
consumption of animals is always wrong.
In our view, it is the science behind foie gras
production that provides the best way of disentangling the
factual, emotional, and moral aspects of the debate. The
scientific literature on foie gras production provides,
in conjunction with considerable observational evidence by
veterinarians, a reasonable basis for reaching a conclusion about
the question of high levels of pain and suffering.
For the opponents of foie gras, the process is
unacceptable because both the act of feeding and the consequence
of feeding cause the birds large amounts of pain. For these
opponents, foie gras is an evil luxury produced through
immense animal suffering to satisfy the depraved appetites of a
morally sick elite.
The scientific evidence about the feeding process seems, however,
to be at odds with the claim of unacceptable levels of pain. For
one thing, foie gras exists because it is based on a
natural fact about ducks, that is, they routinely eat very large
quantities of food before migration.
For another, a number of research studies have examined the
physiological effects of force-feeding to determine whether the
insertion of the feeding tube and the actual feeding process
cause a large amount of pain. A 1998 report by the European
Union’s Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare
found “no evidence that intensive force feeding is stressful to
the male hybrid duck.”
Similar results have been reported in the United States. A study,
for example, on the effects of force-feeding on the esophagus of
geese found no change in the esophageal tissue consistent with
pain and distress.
During a 2005 debate about foie gras in the House of
Delegates of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA),
Dr. Walter McCarthy noted that birds used in foie gras
production had esophagi lined with a cornified epithelium that
was sufficiently tough and elastic to accept the significant
amounts of food given to the birds. Other AVMA delegates noted
that there is no physiological reason why tube feeding itself
should be stressful. After he visited farms producing foie
gras, Dr. Robert Gordon said that, “My position changed
dramatically. I did not see animals I would consider distressed
and I didn’t see pain and suffering.”
This still leaves the question of whether the consequence of the
feeding regime results in unacceptable levels of pain and
suffering. Once more, the scientific evidence speaks against the
animal rights activists. In its report, the EU committee noted
that the liver pathology described by foie gras
opponents is not supported by either epidemiological evidence or
by common sense.
Exploding livers, after all, make the product commercially
useless. Moreover, as the EU report notes, the animals are killed
before liver pathology can occur. Although mortality rates are
higher than in comparable ducks, the overall death rate is less
than that for farm-raised chickens and turkeys.
None of this will change the minds of those who believe that
foie gras is an immoral luxury available only through
unacceptable animal suffering. However, for those who wish to
think about the issue through a scientific lens, it should go
some way toward rethinking an emotional, and often scientifically
uninformed, debate.
