Duck Farm Flap

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/chi-0510040325oct05,1,1523103.story

Quoted in the article:

Animal Protection & Rescue League: www.APRL.org

In Defense of Animals: www.idausa.org

campaign website: www.stopforcefeeding.com

Duck farm flap

Although Charlie Trotter had visited foie gras farms years before he decided to pull the dish from his menus, he says the moral choice becomes clear once one has observed the process. `I invite anybody, if they're able, to go to a farm and see what's up and then draw your conclusions,' he said. So we did.

By Mark Caro
Tribune staff reporter

October 5, 2005

FARMINGTON, Calif. -- The process itself takes just a few seconds and appears to be relatively painless. That is, the ducks aren't complaining -- not that they could with their gullets stuffed with corn.

The feeder, in this case a thick-mustached worker named Jorge Vargas, steps from one duck pen into another, plops a milk crate onto the raised floor and squats down, a long copper feeding tube in hand. The ducks, usually about 10 of them, are huddling in a corner of the 31/2-foot-by-10-foot pen.

Do they look happy about the force-feeding that's about to take place?

No.

A lot of people care passionately about the welfare of these waterfowl. Laws have been broken, laws have been passed and others are being considered, such as Ald. Joseph Moore's (49th) proposed Chicago ban on the dish (it's in a City Council committee) and an Illinois bill, which passed the Senate and is in House committee, that would bar foie gras production in the state (despite the absence of any local producers). In other states, restaurants have been picketed; property trespassed on; businesses, homes and cars vandalized.

Foie gras -- the ages-old delicacy that is the fattened liver of a force-fed duck or goose -- is such an incendiary topic that it has transformed artistic-minded chefs into "Crossfire"-worthy pugilists of poultry, with Charlie Trotter (of his self-named restaurant) and Rick Tramonto (of Tru) exchanging particularly colorful barbs a few months back: Tramonto called meat-lover Trotter's ban on the dish "a little hypocritical"; Trotter refuted this "idiot comment" by suggesting Tramonto's fat liver be served up instead.

Pricey dish

Given that foie gras is a pricey dish enjoyed by a select sliver of the population, the passions stirred by this issue might seem out of whack. Yet these duck livers have opened a Pandora's box of dicey questions regarding the use of living creatures in food production.

How much must an animal suffer before winding up on a dinner plate?

If foie gras production is cruel, can the treatment of, say, factory-farmed chicken and pork be justified?

Although Trotter took years to quit serving the dish after his initial visits to foie gras farms, he contends that the basic answers should be self-evident to anyone who actually observes the process. .

So we took the trip.

Only three foie gras farms operate in the United States, two in New York State and one in California. Of those, California's Sonoma Foie Gras is the most immediately endangered because last fall that state passed a law -- to take effect in 2012 -- outlawing the sale and production of foie gras when made from force-fed birds, as it is by definition.

Sonoma Foie Gras owner Guillermo Gonzalez says he intends to use the next several years "to demonstrate that what we are doing is completely legitimate and non-injurious and non-abusive of the ducks."

What he sees at his farm is standard agricultural practice.

What his foes see is animal torture.

Although Gonzalez, 53, and his wife, Junny, run their 20-year-old business from wine-country town of Sonoma, their actual farm is located almost 100 miles east of San Francisco in the rural town of Farmington. The drive there covers miles of unpaved road past rows of livestock farms. The entry gate offers no indication of the business within, just signs that read, "Alto," "!No entre!" "Stop" and "Keep out! Biosecure Area."

An adjacent barn holds about 4,000 18-day-old ducks that eat and drink at stations set up around the cavernous space. The air feels dense, buzzing with flies and scented with gaminess and the floor-covering wood shavings.

At this point each duck weighs about 1.65 pounds, Gonzalez says. You can tell the ones that have just eaten by the bulges in their necks.

"They just eat, sleep," Delmas says.

"Play," Gonzalez adds.

Still yellow and fuzzy, these ducks tend to sit and move en masse, like an avian variation on the computer-generated armies of movie epics. After five or six weeks during which they develop their feathers, the ducks are moved outside to roam until they're 12 weeks old. Then comes the force-feeding period known as gavage.

The final two to three weeks of their take place in two adjacent, long barns that are darker and danker than the others. The air is suffused with the pungent aroma of feathers and droppings. Single, hanging, exposed 40-watt bulbs offer dim light. At the barn's far end, large fans blow cool air through the building.

The pens are lined up in four rows, their slatted floors raised about 3 feet from the ground to let the manure fall through. The ducks have some room to maneuver, though they tend to cluster when anyone walks by.

2 grades of foie gras

Near the barn's entrance sits a large wheelbarrow filled with corn kernels, which are cleaned, cooked and mixed with corn oil to make the ducks' feed. These ducks are being raised to make Artisan Foie Gras, the business' premium line. The ducks in the second barn produce the standard Sonoma Foie Gras line, and their diet is a combination of ground and whole corn plus water and minerals.

The Sonoma ducks' food is harder to digest but cheaper to make, and the feedings are quicker: 1-2 seconds apiece compared with 5-8 seconds for the Artisan ducks. Hence the Sonoma Foie Gras is less expensive: $26-$31 per pound wholesale vs. $31-$34 per pound for the Artisan.

The two barns' feeding machines differ slightly as well, but the basic principle is the same: sticking a copper tube down a duck's esophagus and filling it to the brim with corn. The feedings take place twice a day, with three workers in each barn taking charge of the gavage.

On this late morning, Vargas is still working his way through the Artisan ducks. He steps from one pen into another and sits on his crate, the copper tube suspended like an oversize dentist's drill. The ducks huddle in a corner.

"They know what's going to happen, and they don't like to be grabbed," Delmas says.

Vargas takes the first one by the neck, points the beak straight up in the air and drops the copper tube down, down, down the duck's throat. The machine, driven by hydraulic pressure, whizzes and spits 400 to 450 grams of feed into the duck's esophagus.

Vargas hoists the copper tube and places the duck to his left, his body separating it from those still to be fed. This duck flaps its wings and looks around.

"You can feel the corn," Delmas says, placing his fingers at the base of the duck's bulging throat. "He is full here" -- he moves his fingers up to the chin -- "to here."

These ducks are about nine days into the gavage. Deeper into the barn reside ducks just a day or two from processing. A few have grown so unsteady that they fall over as they try to walk.

"He is weak, and he is going to go into processing tomorrow," Delmas says of one.

Some also are breathing heavily.

"They are panting," Delmas says. "They're like dogs."

"The panting is a thermal regulation mechanism," Gonzalez says. "They are so fat, so they are hot."

The ducks are processed -- i.e., slaughtered -- when they have reached their maximum weight, usually about 15 pounds. Gonzalez did himself some public-relations damage two years ago when a local TV interviewer asked him what would happen to the ducks if the force-feeding continued indefinitely.

He replied, "Obviously they will die."

Gonzalez complains that his comment was intercut with an animal-rights group's "horror" footage of distressed foie gras ducks. Still, the farmers do have to stop filling those esophagi. "At one time they are going to stop digesting," Delmas says, "so there is no point."

By the time the ducks are killed, their livers have ballooned to an average of 1 1/2 pounds -- or, Gonzalez says, between eight and 10 times their normal size. Last year Sonoma Foie Gras processed 80,000 ducks, and despite the controversy Gonzalez expects this year's total to rise to 90,000 thanks to the dish's increased popularity.

The great debate

So after all of this, do the ducks suffer, and if so, how much?

They're not saying.

"The birds can't talk," says Elliot Katz, founder of the Mill Valley, Calif.-based In Defense of Animals. "All they can do is waddle and suffer. They don't scream like other animals."

Advocates on either side cite numerous studies, polls and bans (or rescinded bans) that support their positions. There's little clarity in the middle either. This summer the American Veterinary Medical Association rebuffed animal-rights activists' push for a condemnation of such force-feeding, announcing that its review of "science and current production practices" led the group to conclude that "it is not necessary . . . to take a position either for or against foie gras production at this time."

Even Tirath Sandhu, laboratory director for Cornell University's non-political Duck Research Laboratory, can't be definitive. "I don't know whether they are suffering or not," Sandhu says, noting that a French study shows that foie gras ducks don't demonstrate certain hormone-level increases normally associated with stress. But, he adds, "I would be stressed."

Gonzalez doesn't deny that his ducks experience stress -- it's just a matter of degree.

"When they are fat, when they are heavy, obviously the animal is not moving around like if it would be in the orchard when it weighs five less pounds," he says. "No, we are aware that we are demanding an effort from the animal. But that is not exclusive to us doing foie gras, and we are demanding of the animal only in the last three or four days of that two-week period."

Gonzalez has less than seven years to sway the public -- or at least the California legislature -- to his perspective. "This is simply about raising ducks for food," he says, "giving them the very best care possible in order to obtain from them the very most economically."

`Horror' video causing a flap

One key weapon in the animal rights campaign against foie gras is a video shot by the San Diego-based Animal Protection and Rescue League at Sonoma Foie Gras. Taped on the sly by group members who sneaked onto the farm after dark about 12 times, the footage shows barrels full of dead ducks plus live ducks that are hobbling, struggling and in one case bleeding from the rear end while a rat nibbles away.

"We wanted to document the animal cruelty that goes into the foie gras product," League co-director Bryan Pease says.

Sonoma owner Guillermo Gonzalez complains that this "horror video" just crams together disturbing but inevitable farm images, such as lame or dead animals. He adds, "I personally have never seen a duck bleeding from the rear. . . . I very seriously believe -- I'm almost convinced -- that this was staged."

The notion incenses Pease.

"How would that even work?" he asks. "You stick something on the back of the duck, and then we brought the rat, too, and the rat is just going to go and eat the wounds of the duck?"

Gonzalez says: "It's very easy for someone in the middle of the night to put some chicken wire around the pen, to put some substance in the rear of the duck that may be attractive for a rat to come and nibble."

Back to Pease: "Guillermo Gonzalez's accusation about us staging that footage is one of the craziest, stupidest things I've ever heard this psychotic animal torturer to ever say. It comes down to who are you going to believe, the guy who's force-feeding the ducks or the people who are volunteering their time to put an end to it?"

-- Mark Caro

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