The animals are literally force fed with a tube. The animal's liver swells to many times its normal size. I am not sure what you are talking about. There is a reason why this practice is controversial to begin with. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
I have not actually seen it (and I'm not the OP), but I have been told by French farmers that geese do willingly and even eagerly run up to get the tube inserted so that they can have the food force fed into their gullet. At least with the few farmers I've talked to about this, the tube was not inserted permanently (these were very small operations). Having never actually seen it, I don't have any understanding of the discomfort the animals face or the extent to which these reports are true. But neither do I have reliable information that it is not true.
Disclaimer: I don't eat foie gras and don't advocate it either.
The actual fact that geese can eat that much and double size (or more) is natural and necessary for their migration. It's possible to make foie gras by just letting the goose eating itself. Acording to my parents when they were living on farms when young, that's the way they were doing it.
Just banning the practice of force feeding would make more sense.
I've read about the acorn foie guy, and wasn't sure how legit the story was. If foie gras can be made by having free range geese and plentiful food for them, that would make foie production even more of a luxury item, but at least that would render the gavage controversy no a longer critical issue.
Below someone quoted this: "it will be assumed that all foie gras came from duck or geese that have been force-fed unless “documentary” evidence is provided to the contrary."
This is a by-product of battery breeding, and not the only way to make foie gras. Geese will feed too much anyways at certain times of the year in their own will.
Same as pigs that get removed from their mothers and live in cages barely sized for them. It doesn't have to be that way.
Buying responsibly is a first step, and forbidding torturous practises would be another one. Not killing animals at all is yet another discussion.
That's only one way to do it, probably the most efficient one for mass farming. In my country there is a similar delicacy, but instead of tube traditionally geese were fed by hand. Farmers would prepare balls of food, and then those balls were pushed into the geese's beak and down the throat by hand, until it's totally full. This is more time consuming than using a funnel and a tube to just pour the food.
I never ate foie gras and I hate french cuisine, but I hate more people believing anything they read on the internet without having any prior knowledge of the topic.
Foie gras is much less horrifying than the existence of Google and Facebook, the amount of plastic in the oceans or the pile of toxic waste produced by disposable tech.
It's just a fancy traditional regional food that's not even mass produced.
> Under the law, it will be assumed that all foie gras came from duck or geese that have been force-fed unless “documentary” evidence is provided to the contrary.
Guilty until proven innocent seems to be the general trend in NYC these days.
Or maybe lawmakers are just tired of seeing loopholes abused by unscrupulous people. It's like banning shark fin, it just gets taken off the menu but can be ordered in mandarin.
I don't think it is entirely unfair that restaurants be required to prove origin when challenged, especially for commonly counterfeited ingredients.
Let's say that I go to a restaurant that claims they only use true cinnamon and Kashmir saffron to flavor a cinnamon roll, which they sell at a premium because of the high-quality ingredients.
When challenged, that restaurant needs to be able to show proof that they are delivering as advertised.
If it turns out that they were instead using artificial flavors and colors, then they are guilty of fraud, and the punishment should be scaled to the difficulty of detecting infraction.
Similarly, if a restaurant claims to be selling humanely-sourced shark fin (not even sure how that works, but let's roll with it), and can't substantiate that claim, then there does need to be some kind of punishment for deceiving their customers.
> Let's say that I go to a restaurant that claims they only use true cinnamon and Kashmir saffron to flavor a cinnamon roll, which they sell at a premium because of the high-quality ingredients.
> When challenged, that restaurant needs to be able to show proof that they are delivering as advertised.
> If it turns out that they were instead using artificial flavors and colors, then they are guilty of fraud, and the punishment should be scaled to the difficulty of detecting infraction.
Can the punishment also be scaled to the harm, or potential harm, caused by the fraud? In a case like this, that would be nothing.
> Can the punishment also be scaled to the harm, or potential harm, caused by the fraud? In a case like this, that would be nothing.
The harm is indeed relevant! "Crimes" without a victim, or where the victim and the perpetrator are the same person, should not be crimes.
But in this case, the harm is decidedly not nothing:
(1) How many consumers chose "Cakes of Deceit" over their competition, "A Taste of Honesty", on account of those premium ingredients? This pushes other businesses to engage in dishonest behavior in order to level the playing field.
(2) How many customers paid more for the "premium" offering because of its ingredients? What would they have paid had they known the truth? The difference between these two is the amount of money stolen from the customers.
(3) What is the economic impact to the sellers of the premium ingredients? Presumably, customers eating at "Cakes of Deceit" will come out with the opinion that "Kashmir Saffron" and "True Cinnamon" aren't any different than the cheap stuff.
This is far from a case of "no harm, no foul"
Also, you scale punishment to fit the difficulty of detection -- and I would argue, the guilty's ability to pay -- as it keeps the risk-reward equation balanced.
Imagine a shoplifter, Alice. She is caught stealing a $10 pack of cigarettes from the corner liquor store.
Alice offers to pay for the cigarettes once she is caught.
Sounds fair, right?
Suppose that we know that there is a one in ten chance of catching a shoplifter. That means for every ten times Alice tries to shoplift those $10 packs of cigarettes, she'll escape punishment nine times, and get caught once.
The corner store would be out $90 in goods in this case. Alice would be out the $10 for a single legitimate purchase. So we adjust the punishment upwards to make the process of shoplifting unpalatable to Alice in any case.
Now, what if Alice is wealthy, and just stealing for the thrill of it?
Well, a $200 fine probably won't mean much to her. So we scale the punishment until it does.
The Swiss do this, and I highly support it. If we are going to make something illegal -- which we do far too much, I must admit -- being wealthy shouldn't be equivalent to a Get Out Of Jail Free card.
The specifics of an alleged crime are irrelevant. Treating people as if they are guilty when you have no evidence of a crime (“reasonable suspicion”, in legal terms) is a violation of their civil rights.
I can’t help thinking that this has little to do with foie gras, but is part of wider push by vegetarians to ban meat eating. You could argue that an animal had a bad time for any meat.
I’m not taking a stance on either side here but how can you make this case when animals are killing other animals all the time for food? Or is the case that humans are “above animals” in that we don’t slaughter anything?
> I’m not taking a stance on either side here but how can you make this case when animals are killing other animals all the time for food?
We're not in a survival situation, we have options that don't involve killing animals whereas animals do not, and we don't base our moral choices on what animals do to each other.
> Unlike dogs and other omnivores, cats are true (so-called “obligate”) carnivores: They meet their nutritional needs by consuming other animals and have a higher protein requirement than many other mammals. Cats get certain key nutrients from meat—including taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamin A and vitamin B12—that can’t be sufficiently obtained from plant-based foods. Without a steady supply of these nutrients, cats can suffer from liver and heart problems, not to mention skin irritation and hearing loss.
Sure. My point was only that cats kill even when they are already well fed. The larger point is that nature can be cruel.
I suppose I should have written a proper more detailed comment, I absolutely do believe that humans should hold ourselves to a higher standard and definitely shouldn’t be doing cruel things to living creatures because we do know better and can do better. But nature is still a pretty messed up place sometimes.
Be careful about drawing conclusions about broader nature from the behavior of the domestic cat. The cat’s behavior is, like the dog’s, very significantly the result of human driven natural selection. In the cat’s case, humans have favored them for 1000s of years because they kill pests like rodents. That was their ancestral “job”, their role as a domesticated animal that lives in harmony with humans.
You can probably find some other animals in nature that kill for no apparent reason though. There is apparently a term for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing (though the term confusingly conflates unnecessary killing with caching the excess for later)
We can reason about what we do and make conscious choices about our diet. I don't believe other animals can. That power gives us a special responsibility.
We are also omnivores that don't need to eat meat to survive. Maybe for instance dolphins can also reason about what they do, I don't know. But their biology gives them less choice.
Also humans now eat so much meat that the mammals we breed for food are 15 times as much biomass as all wild mammals combined. It's almost irrelevant what other mammals do, there are so few of them.
Even so, it's a personal choice. It happens that I made a choice to be vegetarian, but that was only five weeks ago... Other people make their choice. But it's different from the case of other animals killing for food.
Milk and egg production still involve animals being killed for meat though e.g. female diary cows are killed for meat when they stop producing enough milk after a few years and males from diary cows are killed within a month of being born as veal.
I see no issue with free range eggs from a local keeping chickens (where I know that they are, indeed, well treated, well kept and free range) since they lay eggs most days whether you eat them or not and if you don’t use them, they would rot or attract rodents.
> I see no issue with free range eggs from a local keeping chickens
- Male chickens are usually ground up alive within a day of being born because they're not economical to keep for meat. Locally kept chickens still feed into this supply and demand as the egg laying hens have to come from somewhere.
- Egg laying chickens can live for about 8 years but are usually killed after 2 years when they stop producing as many eggs. This happens at free range farms too.
- Also, free range doesn't mean what most people think it does e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_range#Free-range_poultry "In the United States, the USDA free range regulations currently apply only to poultry and indicate that the animal has been allowed access to the outside.[3] The USDA regulations do not specify the quality or size of the outside range nor the duration of time an animal must have access to the outside.[4] ... Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States. Likewise, free-range egg producers have no common standard on what the term means"
> since they lay eggs most days whether you eat them or not and if you don’t use them, they would rot or attract rodents.
We bred chickens to lay eggs that often though (wild chickens lay about 10 eggs a year whereas factory chickens lay about 300 which is so much it damages their health) and for them to leave their eggs unprotected (they've been bred to not "brood"). They're forced into this cycle.
> free range doesn't mean what most people think it does
That’s why I said local. I grew up in the country and lots of people had a few chickens. They run around freely and are not “farmed”. They’re almost pets. They lay eggs all the time, so there’s nothing wrong with eating those eggs.
As for where the hens come from, this is how my parents got hens when they kept chickens a long time ago: go to your neighbour with a rooster and say “hey, neighbour, could I get some chicks next time you have some? Thanks”
> Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States
I don’t live in the US though.
> We bred chickens to lay eggs that often
Ok, but now that they do, what are we to do? Slaughter all the non-farmed free range chickens to find some wild ones? The damage is done, what’s wrong with giving them good lives and enjoying their abandoned eggs?
For egg production, usually they are killed as chicks. This can be quite gruesome in the larger outfits, where they are sorted and the males run through essentially a woodchipper.
If you have too many adult roosters running around, they act like assholes and start fighting, pecking eggs, and other nastiness, so you don't want to keep them.
Meat chickens are usually mixed sex, as they are bred to grow so quickly that you slaughter them after only two or three months.
Historically, people would castrate male chicks and raise them as capons for eating, but that's become rather niche.
How many eggs would each person get to eat per year using that production method? We surely wouldn't be able to keep boiling them, frying them, using them in most baked goods, and so on, because production would drop to a fraction of what it currently is.
I'm vegan, and on my honeymoon we went to a place where hens ran around free in the villages and would crawl underneath bushes to sleep for the night. Even I wouldn't see any ethical problems with humans grabbing unfertilized eggs they found under bushes each morning, but as I said, how many people would that feed?
It's the same as me having much less of a problem with hunting than I do factory farming, because a bullet and instant death, or at least within a couple of minutes, is a much better life for the animal than factory farming. But if we limited meat eating to only that being hunted, people would get to eat a small fraction of the meat they eat today.
Or rather, price would probably be so high that only the most well-off could afford the eggs and meat in that world. If you're in that group you might still get eggs and meat, otherwise not. Still, people who use these two examples as ethical ways of getting eggs and meat must also agree that we would need plant-based alternatives for almost all our current uses.
Also, as of 2013, 98% of hens in the US was in cages, and 2% free-range:
In the EU, it was 60% cage, 25% barn, 12% free-range, and 3% organic. At least for Sweden, free-range can still be indoors, but organic requires access to the outside. So even moving only to current free-range eggs would mean a drastic reduction of consumption.
Maybe I should have put scare quotes around “free range”, I didn’t mean free range certified or whatever, I literally meant “running around freely” like what you described on your honeymoon.
> how many people would that feed?
Where I grew up, lots of people had a few hens running around and they typically gave their excess eggs away as there were too many. It wouldn’t take that much to sustain a small community on eggs.
But yes, you’re right, it wouldn’t replace the egg industry, my point is simply that if you do have access to such eggs, then I see no issues with eating them, even if you’re otherwise vegan.
> must also agree that we would need plant-based alternatives for almost all our current uses.
I don’t disagree at all and certainly never said we can replace all farmed eggs with cruelty-free free-roaming-chicken eggs, just that if you do have access to those eggs, then as far as I’m concerned, enjoy some eggs.
The push appears to be coming from animal rights groups, many of whom may or may not be vegetarian / vegan. I wouldn't lump this squarely on someone because of their decision to not consume animal products.
I was surprised to learn that India is the only country[1] to ban the production and import of Foie Gras. Very few people would even know about the dish in India.
But anyway, I hope this torturous practice comes to an end worldwide.
Do you eat meat at all? If so, how were the animals raised, slaughtered and processed?
This ban seems rather hypocritical to me given the atrocities happening in mass meat production.
While there are absolutely terrible things happening in Foie Gras production (I would never, ever buy any products from Hungary, as a for example) the really good stuff is raised quite humanely.[1]
To me this just looks like an attempt for quick political gain without any advantage to any factory raised animal (which, for the record, I regard as one of our biggest moral failings as humans).
Not anymore; stopped about three years back. It was difficult personally after I became a parent. The rest of my family are meat and fish eaters and I keep out of their preferences.
This can only be done in phases. Raise awareness, ban instances of extreme cruelty, support substitutes etc. I'm very optimistic - Impossible burgers and sandwiches are quite close to the real thing and if prices come down (and we have more choices and availability) it could be a guilt-free, and even healthier alternative.
Eating meat is not the only way to inflict pain on animals.
Animal tested products are horrible on animals. For example, they test that a soap or a shampoo doesn't irritate eyes too much by putting a concentrated form of the product on some animal's eye over and over again, sometimes rendering them blind. And that's just the beginning. It's just horrible.
Milk doesn't kill cows, but cows can only produce milk after giving birth. You are smart enough to figure out the rest of the story: cows are forced to give birth to calves, the calves are "taken away", and the milk is harvested. The animals get traumatized in the process, crying for days.
Chicken eggs should not require us to kill, but in practice if a male chick is born they're often "sacrificed" (often by being ground alive). The survivors spend their lives in a cage.
We should absolutely also address other atrocities in meat production, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't also address this. Personally I only eat animals I know to have had a decent life, because I don't want to contribute to the torture of animals.
But changing the mass meat market is sadly a lot harder than changing the market for such a specialty item.
Avoiding restaurants that serve meat is a lot harder than avoiding restaurants that serve foie gras. I hope it's a step in the right direction and we'll create better standards for how we treat animals.
I support this, but I’m not sure about its moral groundwork. I’ve never tried foie gras, and after reading about it I’m increasingly sure I never will. The fact that I find little pleasure in food delicacies and am thus not affected in the slightest by this ban makes it hard to sympathize with those who resist it; It’s just wasteful to me, after all. But someone could just as easily say that about my leather jackets and my fast fashion, or my snazzy tech purchases or all those luxuries I thoroughly enjoy. It feels unfair to decide this by a vote of people who are likely not affected, who don’t reap its value. But how, then, do we choose what’s right and what’s not?
I enjoy foie gras and i happily live in a place where it's unlikely to be banned in my lifetime. No nation which has only recently turned to service economy from agriculture-driven economy and most population grew in the countryside, will do it, because they know and readily accept that all agriculture is the torture of animals or it just doesn't pay for itself. Also, it's just tasty.
If I were an investor I would ask Hudson Valley and the other specialty farms to look into GMO and lab-grown foie. Maybe liver is easier to do than muscle tissue.
Foie tastes like magical butter and it would be wonderful if there was a more ethical way to have it.
He talks about a farmer who is not force feeding the animals, but instead prepares the grassland such that those animals voluntarily eat themselves into a fat liver. Taste seems to be superb, for those who eat animals for fun.
Nice case of double standards. The practice of force feeding geese looks more cruel than it is. It's basically nothing compared to what we routinely do to chickens and other farm animals. Industrial chicken farming is infinitely more cruel compared to this.
We're talking about organically farmed birds that are kept such that they are fattened up and delicious (aka. in good health) in a way that is the complete opposite of the dystopian life of a chicken bred in cage that needs antibiotics just to survive their miserable life long enough to be slaughtered.
Banning Kentucky fried chicken or other fast food chains would be considered ludicrous. So, is this.
I eat meat and chicken but I'm well aware where it came from. I've had foie gras a couple of times. Not crazy about it but I appreciate it.
I can't help feeling a similar way, a small group of wealthy people eating an obscure, traditional food is an easier target and makes for a much better story than addressing the elephant in the room that is mainstream factory farming.
It's very far from a "luxury" or "wealthy" item in France, it's something most families will have on their table at Christmas. I don't know where this false luxury stereotype comes from.
Well its a rather expensive item in the shops. Affordable still, but paying 15-30 euros for a small box brings it into affordable luxury category IMHO. Its more expensive than exquisite french/italian cheeses with black truffles for example.
Same would go for ie Moet champagne, one can afford it but you definitely notice the price.
Also, there is some. Anthropocentric thinking going on. A person thinks they wouldn't want a funnel stuck down their throat and forced fed grain. Yet, the birds will line up for it and seem to really enjoy it(for one, they don't have a gag reflex)
I would argue that live plucking geese for goose down as is just as unpleasant for the goose as force-feeding. Some unfortunate geese even have to suffer through both.
I'm not sure of the level of overfeeding that happens, nor the precise health implications thereof, but afaik foie gras originated from killing wild geese who had "over"-fed themselves as part of their regular pre-migration preparation.
Foie gras does not come from geese who are merely "fattened up". It comes from geese who have been made intentionally sick to make their liver swell up to several times it's normal (healthy) size.
There is such a thing a thing as more natural "animal friendly" foie gras which apparently takes advantage of geese's natural instinct to gorge themselves before migration, which results in a slightly enlarged liver, but still much smaller than the traditional foie gras. I've never been able to find any in a restaurant, though, so I just avoid foie gras and the restaurants that serve it.
I don't believe it is double standards to ban one thing and not another, if that was the case then progress would never be made with anything. Maybe banning the wholesale production of meat is a bit more complex than banning a few restaurants serving one particular cruel foodstuff?
I have worked in chicken factories, and I can say without reservation that these places are not nice. I still eat chicken though.
Whilst battery farming is cruel and inhumane to the animals, it can be done in a better way.
However, foie gras can never be done humanely, it's a horrible practice where the animal has to suffer in order for a diner to have 5 minutes of gastronomic enjoyment.
Weird that there seems to be much more debate in US about force feeding geese than force-feeding prisoners. Not that I support either of the practices.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadDisclaimer: I don't eat foie gras and don't advocate it either.
Just banning the practice of force feeding would make more sense.
You can find a few things online about those alternative way https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=487088946
So, non-force-feed remains legal.
You don't have to buy the force fed kind though.
Buying responsibly is a first step, and forbidding torturous practises would be another one. Not killing animals at all is yet another discussion.
I never ate foie gras and I hate french cuisine, but I hate more people believing anything they read on the internet without having any prior knowledge of the topic.
Foie gras is much less horrifying than the existence of Google and Facebook, the amount of plastic in the oceans or the pile of toxic waste produced by disposable tech.
It's just a fancy traditional regional food that's not even mass produced.
Guilty until proven innocent seems to be the general trend in NYC these days.
If shark fin is illegal, then being able to order it in Mandarin isn't a "loophole" -- it doesn't magically become legal on a technicality.
It's just a means of avoiding enforcement of the law, by making the illicit activity less obvious.
People will find loopholes anyway.
It's not even hard in this case.
Let's say that I go to a restaurant that claims they only use true cinnamon and Kashmir saffron to flavor a cinnamon roll, which they sell at a premium because of the high-quality ingredients.
When challenged, that restaurant needs to be able to show proof that they are delivering as advertised.
If it turns out that they were instead using artificial flavors and colors, then they are guilty of fraud, and the punishment should be scaled to the difficulty of detecting infraction.
Similarly, if a restaurant claims to be selling humanely-sourced shark fin (not even sure how that works, but let's roll with it), and can't substantiate that claim, then there does need to be some kind of punishment for deceiving their customers.
> When challenged, that restaurant needs to be able to show proof that they are delivering as advertised.
> If it turns out that they were instead using artificial flavors and colors, then they are guilty of fraud, and the punishment should be scaled to the difficulty of detecting infraction.
Can the punishment also be scaled to the harm, or potential harm, caused by the fraud? In a case like this, that would be nothing.
The harm is indeed relevant! "Crimes" without a victim, or where the victim and the perpetrator are the same person, should not be crimes.
But in this case, the harm is decidedly not nothing:
(1) How many consumers chose "Cakes of Deceit" over their competition, "A Taste of Honesty", on account of those premium ingredients? This pushes other businesses to engage in dishonest behavior in order to level the playing field.
(2) How many customers paid more for the "premium" offering because of its ingredients? What would they have paid had they known the truth? The difference between these two is the amount of money stolen from the customers.
(3) What is the economic impact to the sellers of the premium ingredients? Presumably, customers eating at "Cakes of Deceit" will come out with the opinion that "Kashmir Saffron" and "True Cinnamon" aren't any different than the cheap stuff.
This is far from a case of "no harm, no foul"
Also, you scale punishment to fit the difficulty of detection -- and I would argue, the guilty's ability to pay -- as it keeps the risk-reward equation balanced.
Imagine a shoplifter, Alice. She is caught stealing a $10 pack of cigarettes from the corner liquor store.
Alice offers to pay for the cigarettes once she is caught.
Sounds fair, right?
Suppose that we know that there is a one in ten chance of catching a shoplifter. That means for every ten times Alice tries to shoplift those $10 packs of cigarettes, she'll escape punishment nine times, and get caught once.
The corner store would be out $90 in goods in this case. Alice would be out the $10 for a single legitimate purchase. So we adjust the punishment upwards to make the process of shoplifting unpalatable to Alice in any case.
Now, what if Alice is wealthy, and just stealing for the thrill of it?
Well, a $200 fine probably won't mean much to her. So we scale the punishment until it does.
The Swiss do this, and I highly support it. If we are going to make something illegal -- which we do far too much, I must admit -- being wealthy shouldn't be equivalent to a Get Out Of Jail Free card.
But it reads much better in the original French.
One could certainly make a case for banning animal slaughter, but I suppose it would be practical only after we have good meat substitutes.
But in the meantime we could perhaps ban wanton cruelty such as Foie Gras. I'll add veal too to the list now.
We're not in a survival situation, we have options that don't involve killing animals whereas animals do not, and we don't base our moral choices on what animals do to each other.
Also: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/veggie-cat-food/
> Unlike dogs and other omnivores, cats are true (so-called “obligate”) carnivores: They meet their nutritional needs by consuming other animals and have a higher protein requirement than many other mammals. Cats get certain key nutrients from meat—including taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamin A and vitamin B12—that can’t be sufficiently obtained from plant-based foods. Without a steady supply of these nutrients, cats can suffer from liver and heart problems, not to mention skin irritation and hearing loss.
Unlike cats, we can survive without meat.
I suppose I should have written a proper more detailed comment, I absolutely do believe that humans should hold ourselves to a higher standard and definitely shouldn’t be doing cruel things to living creatures because we do know better and can do better. But nature is still a pretty messed up place sometimes.
You can probably find some other animals in nature that kill for no apparent reason though. There is apparently a term for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing (though the term confusingly conflates unnecessary killing with caching the excess for later)
Certainly, IMHO. While many animals show varying levels of compassion, we are capable of doing that on a coordinated, global scale; which is unique.
We are also omnivores that don't need to eat meat to survive. Maybe for instance dolphins can also reason about what they do, I don't know. But their biology gives them less choice.
Also humans now eat so much meat that the mammals we breed for food are 15 times as much biomass as all wild mammals combined. It's almost irrelevant what other mammals do, there are so few of them.
Even so, it's a personal choice. It happens that I made a choice to be vegetarian, but that was only five weeks ago... Other people make their choice. But it's different from the case of other animals killing for food.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
Milk and egg production still involve animals being killed for meat though e.g. female diary cows are killed for meat when they stop producing enough milk after a few years and males from diary cows are killed within a month of being born as veal.
- Male chickens are usually ground up alive within a day of being born because they're not economical to keep for meat. Locally kept chickens still feed into this supply and demand as the egg laying hens have to come from somewhere.
- Egg laying chickens can live for about 8 years but are usually killed after 2 years when they stop producing as many eggs. This happens at free range farms too.
- Also, free range doesn't mean what most people think it does e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_range#Free-range_poultry "In the United States, the USDA free range regulations currently apply only to poultry and indicate that the animal has been allowed access to the outside.[3] The USDA regulations do not specify the quality or size of the outside range nor the duration of time an animal must have access to the outside.[4] ... Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States. Likewise, free-range egg producers have no common standard on what the term means"
> since they lay eggs most days whether you eat them or not and if you don’t use them, they would rot or attract rodents.
We bred chickens to lay eggs that often though (wild chickens lay about 10 eggs a year whereas factory chickens lay about 300 which is so much it damages their health) and for them to leave their eggs unprotected (they've been bred to not "brood"). They're forced into this cycle.
That’s why I said local. I grew up in the country and lots of people had a few chickens. They run around freely and are not “farmed”. They’re almost pets. They lay eggs all the time, so there’s nothing wrong with eating those eggs.
As for where the hens come from, this is how my parents got hens when they kept chickens a long time ago: go to your neighbour with a rooster and say “hey, neighbour, could I get some chicks next time you have some? Thanks”
> Free-range chicken eggs, however, have no legal definition in the United States
I don’t live in the US though.
> We bred chickens to lay eggs that often
Ok, but now that they do, what are we to do? Slaughter all the non-farmed free range chickens to find some wild ones? The damage is done, what’s wrong with giving them good lives and enjoying their abandoned eggs?
- Do they let the chickens live until they die of natural causes? Or do they kill them before this?
If you have too many adult roosters running around, they act like assholes and start fighting, pecking eggs, and other nastiness, so you don't want to keep them.
Meat chickens are usually mixed sex, as they are bred to grow so quickly that you slaughter them after only two or three months.
Historically, people would castrate male chicks and raise them as capons for eating, but that's become rather niche.
I'm vegan, and on my honeymoon we went to a place where hens ran around free in the villages and would crawl underneath bushes to sleep for the night. Even I wouldn't see any ethical problems with humans grabbing unfertilized eggs they found under bushes each morning, but as I said, how many people would that feed?
It's the same as me having much less of a problem with hunting than I do factory farming, because a bullet and instant death, or at least within a couple of minutes, is a much better life for the animal than factory farming. But if we limited meat eating to only that being hunted, people would get to eat a small fraction of the meat they eat today.
Or rather, price would probably be so high that only the most well-off could afford the eggs and meat in that world. If you're in that group you might still get eggs and meat, otherwise not. Still, people who use these two examples as ethical ways of getting eggs and meat must also agree that we would need plant-based alternatives for almost all our current uses.
Also, as of 2013, 98% of hens in the US was in cages, and 2% free-range:
https://www.ciwf.org.uk/media/5235021/Statistics-Laying-hens...
In the EU, it was 60% cage, 25% barn, 12% free-range, and 3% organic. At least for Sweden, free-range can still be indoors, but organic requires access to the outside. So even moving only to current free-range eggs would mean a drastic reduction of consumption.
> how many people would that feed?
Where I grew up, lots of people had a few hens running around and they typically gave their excess eggs away as there were too many. It wouldn’t take that much to sustain a small community on eggs.
But yes, you’re right, it wouldn’t replace the egg industry, my point is simply that if you do have access to such eggs, then I see no issues with eating them, even if you’re otherwise vegan.
> must also agree that we would need plant-based alternatives for almost all our current uses.
I don’t disagree at all and certainly never said we can replace all farmed eggs with cruelty-free free-roaming-chicken eggs, just that if you do have access to those eggs, then as far as I’m concerned, enjoy some eggs.
Only the most delusional of them believes this is even remotely possible. In the real world, demand for meat is raising.
But anyway, I hope this torturous practice comes to an end worldwide.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras_controversy
This ban seems rather hypocritical to me given the atrocities happening in mass meat production.
While there are absolutely terrible things happening in Foie Gras production (I would never, ever buy any products from Hungary, as a for example) the really good stuff is raised quite humanely.[1]
To me this just looks like an attempt for quick political gain without any advantage to any factory raised animal (which, for the record, I regard as one of our biggest moral failings as humans).
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/11/ethical-f...
Right by which metric?
Not anymore; stopped about three years back. It was difficult personally after I became a parent. The rest of my family are meat and fish eaters and I keep out of their preferences.
This can only be done in phases. Raise awareness, ban instances of extreme cruelty, support substitutes etc. I'm very optimistic - Impossible burgers and sandwiches are quite close to the real thing and if prices come down (and we have more choices and availability) it could be a guilt-free, and even healthier alternative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras_controversy#Statutor...
Animal tested products are horrible on animals. For example, they test that a soap or a shampoo doesn't irritate eyes too much by putting a concentrated form of the product on some animal's eye over and over again, sometimes rendering them blind. And that's just the beginning. It's just horrible.
Milk doesn't kill cows, but cows can only produce milk after giving birth. You are smart enough to figure out the rest of the story: cows are forced to give birth to calves, the calves are "taken away", and the milk is harvested. The animals get traumatized in the process, crying for days.
Chicken eggs should not require us to kill, but in practice if a male chick is born they're often "sacrificed" (often by being ground alive). The survivors spend their lives in a cage.
But changing the mass meat market is sadly a lot harder than changing the market for such a specialty item. Avoiding restaurants that serve meat is a lot harder than avoiding restaurants that serve foie gras. I hope it's a step in the right direction and we'll create better standards for how we treat animals.
Foie tastes like magical butter and it would be wonderful if there was a more ethical way to have it.
He talks about a farmer who is not force feeding the animals, but instead prepares the grassland such that those animals voluntarily eat themselves into a fat liver. Taste seems to be superb, for those who eat animals for fun.
We're talking about organically farmed birds that are kept such that they are fattened up and delicious (aka. in good health) in a way that is the complete opposite of the dystopian life of a chicken bred in cage that needs antibiotics just to survive their miserable life long enough to be slaughtered.
Banning Kentucky fried chicken or other fast food chains would be considered ludicrous. So, is this.
I eat meat and chicken but I'm well aware where it came from. I've had foie gras a couple of times. Not crazy about it but I appreciate it.
Same would go for ie Moet champagne, one can afford it but you definitely notice the price.
A fatty liver is by definition the opposite of good health.
There is such a thing a thing as more natural "animal friendly" foie gras which apparently takes advantage of geese's natural instinct to gorge themselves before migration, which results in a slightly enlarged liver, but still much smaller than the traditional foie gras. I've never been able to find any in a restaurant, though, so I just avoid foie gras and the restaurants that serve it.
However, foie gras can never be done humanely, it's a horrible practice where the animal has to suffer in order for a diner to have 5 minutes of gastronomic enjoyment.
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_s_surprising_foie_gras_...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierwohllabel
For eggs this is even mandatory:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eierkennzeichnung
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_foie_gras_law