Cages in Foie Gras Production

In France, you can buy artisan foie gras from the market. The farmers each have their own stand and are transparent about which method they have used for the last two weeks of a bird's life, during the 'gavage' (fattening): Either cages or no cages.

Prior to the gavage, artisanally farmed foie gras birds are raised free-range in fields with a barn for shelter, on the same farm (and by the same farmer) where they are fattened, killed, butchered and processed.

Ducks on an industrial scale farm, before the final two
weeks' fattening.

I know one farmer lady who chooses not to use cages (instead using straw-lined pens of around 1m x 3m for 6 ducks), while her husband opts for the cage method.

It's quite difficult to find and buy non-cage artisan foie gras in the UK. If you can find it on a website or source it directly from a French farm, it's very expensive to get it shipped. Maybe if demand for higher welfare foie gras increases, more of the bird-friendly foie gras will be produced and cages will be phased out entirely? That's my hope. That's a major reason for this blog's existence.

It's a sad fact that most duck foie gras is currently produced using cages to contain the birds for the last two weeks of their lives, even though they are free-range for the rest. Thankfully, individual battery cages have been banned in the EU, although elsewhere in the world is another story for another day.

When I first started researching and writing about foie gras 10 years ago, battery cages were still very much in use. In the factory farming system, birds are hatched in one place, moved to another farm to be raised in fields for a few months, moved somewhere else for the two weeks of force feeding whilst confined in cages (now communal cages), then to a slaughterhouse. I found it very distressing watching the ducks arriving for slaughter, packed in boxes, looking terrified before being hung upside down on a conveyor belt, electrocuted, plucked by rubber belts, butchered, processed and sent off to retail.

This means that one 'farm' does gavage, and gavage only. Battery cages made sure the birds didn't move and made the insertion of the feeding pipe easier and quicker by a couple of seconds for each bird. Time = money. The force-feeder I visited at the time couldn't conceive of a system without battery cages. I'd like to visit him again to see how he's getting on with the new communal cages. I must just say that the guy was very pleasant and completely honest about his production facility. He compared himself to Bernard Mathews!

Some battery foie gras ducks in the miserable last two
weeks of their life.

An agricultural college local to me in France recently let me have a look at the new cages and see how they work at feeding time. Although not exactly pleasant to see, they were far, far, far, FAR kinder than the battery cages. The birds were calm, unstressed, able to move around. The whole atmosphere was different. I didn't have the urge to cry or let them all out, like I did at the battery cage place.

I am a big fan of the charity Compassion in World Farming, and actively support a lot of their campaigns. But I was angered by their recent 'ban foie gras' email. Why ban a truly ancient and traditional food that can be produced in a compassionate way and still be financially viable to produce? The problem is the cages not the foie gras, and the cages are not necessary to produce foie gras. They don't try to ban chicken because some is produced in hideous ways, or pork because most is unspeakably cruel to pigs. CiWF should be using their resources to campaign for the banning of cages or for clear labelling so that consumers can make an informed choice, and for more non-cage foie gras to be available everywhere, not just at French farmers markets.

So, there you are. The cage facts. I'll write more about the gavage outside the EU another day, and my next post will be about the actual feeding.