Ducks and geese store fat in their liver, and humans (who tend to store fat in their flesh) found that web-footed fowl who had fattened themselves for migration had extra delicious, fat, rich livers. They recreated this phenomenon using force-feeding, sometimes called 'stuffing' in American English, and 'fatty liver' or foie gras was the result. The point of force-feeding is not to create immensely fat birds, but to fatten them as you would any animal before slaughter, and, of course, to create a precious foie gras.
I always imagined that force-fed animals were pitiful, obese creatures that couldn’t walk or even stand up, their body mass too great to be supported by their little legs. This is simply not the case. They are perfectly able to walk about, preen themselves and do what they would normally do (if not stuck in a cage), and you probably wouldn’t be able to tell a force-fed duck from a conventionally fattened one, without an expert eye.
 |
| Some freshly extracted livers in Isabel Viresolvit's kitchen |
• • •
Force-feeding involves putting high quantities of food down into the stomach of a bird, through a pipe with a metal nozzle that is inserted down its neck. The animals are fed softened maize or a maize flour and water paste twice a day, and each feed takes a few seconds per bird. The duck or goose would not naturally choose to eat 400g of maize, even if it were fattening itself for migration. It would also not choose to have the pipe put down its throat. But is the experience really that awful for the birds? Is it possible that the force-feeding itself is not actually that cruel?
Would a cow choose to have painfully swollen udders every day and then have metal suckers stuck on their teats to relieve them? Just because cows in milk production spend a lot of time uncomfortable and in pain does not make it OK for foie gras birds to suffer during feeding, but this example helps illustrate how force-feeding is shrouded in misconception. Brits are used to the idea of cows being milked by a pump and pipes but not birds being fed by pumps and pipes. Neither are natural but that doesn't mean they're traumatic. The painful udders of cows and having their babies taken from them are more likely to be traumatic than the pipes attached to their teats. I feel that being held in a cage for the last two weeks of life is more likely to be traumatic for birds than the pipe delivering food into their stomachs.
It may seem petty to argue over vocabulary, but the word ‘force’ does imply a lot of resistance from and suffering to the bird. It implies violence and cruelty. In other languages, terms for force-feeding don't include the word 'force'. I think this word has a lot to answer for in foie gras production being misunderstood in the English-speaking world.
• • •
If you watch a force-feeding session, you may be surprised at how calm the animals are, and how quick each dose of grain is to administer. The birds I saw being fed in battery cages (now thankfully outlawed in the EU) tried to move away and rattled around, bruising themselves on the cages while the farmer took hold of their neck to insert the nozzle. It was horrible to watch, but mainly due to the duck's confinement rather than the feeding. Birds in the new communal cages seem quite calm. With artisan gavage, the farmer sits on a stool in the pen with the birds, grabs each one and puts it between their legs, holds the bird's head with the nozzle down its throat with one hand, while gently massaging its neck with the other. The birds do not seem any more distressed than if you simply picked them up.
Isabel Viresolvit, a small-scale foie gras farmer who doesn't use cages, says she thinks she would know if the birds she feeds were flinching or in pain, and she is convinced they are not in any discomfort, although of course we can never know for sure. She has the often-held view that it is not possible to make good foie gras from unhappy birds, and indeed over-large livers from over-fed birds are scorned in France, both gastronomically - the too-high fat content means they disintegrate when cooked - and due to questionable husbandry.
Regardless of quantities of feed and cages, the feeder must be gentle and sensitive to the birds' reactions. If a bird's gullet is injured, they will die, and the foie gras will be lost - a total waste of investment and significant loss of profit for the farmer, whether they are an artisan farmer or own an industrial operation.
Isabel's ducks are valuable to her financially and because she is proud of the quality of her product. Her full order book is due to her good reputation, which in turn results from healthy, high welfare birds, and the care she takes over the food she makes from them. She feels she owes it to her ducks to ‘do right’ by the foie gras and other products. A low-paid factory farm worker is far more distanced from the creatures in their care and the bird's financial value, meaning that abuse and neglect are more likely in that kind of situation.
Olivier Audran, a goose foie gras farmer, tells me that geese are even more sensitive than ducks. Geese can only be force-fed during the season that they would naturally be fattening themselves for migration, and they die easily from stress. This means that even if a goose was fed carefully and was unhurt by force-feeding, if its general environment was stressful, it could still be lost.
 |
| Olivier Audran force-feeding his geese |
Although gaveurs need to be gentle, and causing injuries is in no-one's interest, ducks and geese can deal with force-feeding in a way that humans could not. We don’t know what it feels like to be a duck or a goose, whose throat is lined with scales. Ducks eat whole snails, frogs and fish - and stones! They have a gizzard full of stones in fact, to help them grind up and digest all the hard, large and sharp things they swallow without chewing.
• • •
Scientific trials
It's all very well quoting doting farmers who think their birds don't mind being force-fed, but we should look at some impartial research into how foie gras ducks and geese react to it.
Livestock would normally move towards a person who regularly puts out feed for them, but foie gras birds don’t go to their feeder. Scientists at INRA (National Institute for Agricultural Research) in Tours and Bordeaux found that ducks showed some signs of aversion to force-feeding, but not total avoidance, and geese showed no signs of aversion at all.
Firstly, a test consisted of the birds being trained to be fed in a pen eight metres away from their rearing pen, and were then force-fed in the feeding pen. If force-feeding caused aversion, the birds would not spontaneously go to the feeding pen, but they chose to leave rearing pen.
Secondly, flight distances of ducks were measured from the person performing the force-feeding, and from a stranger. The experiment showed that, “The flight distance from the force feeder decreased during the force feeding period. Ducks always avoided the unknown person more than the force feeder. We concluded that there was no development of aversion to the force feeder during the force feeding process."
No comments:
Post a Comment