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Mar 6, 2006 9:44 pm US/Eastern
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Pate Problems Raise Fowl Abuse Issues
MIAMI (CBS4 News) ―
It's one of the most expensive gourmet foods in the world, but it isn't only customers who pay dearly to eat foie gras. The ducks used to make sure pate ends up on your plate are suffering.
That's why the Animal Rights Foundation is campaigning to get local restaurants to stop serving this delicacy, and why some restaurants have now kicked cruelty to the curb.
In video provided by PETA, and secretly recorded by undercover investigators for the animal protection and rescue league, an employee at a foie gras processing facilities shoves a long metal pipe down a duck's throat. Up to four pounds of food will be force fed into its mouth ever day of it's life.
Animal rights activist Holly Bowman explains "Foie gras is French; it means fatty liver and what it is essentially is the grotesquely large liver of a male duck."
Bowman says ducks are forced to consume about four pounds of food each day, the equivalent of a 150 pound man and pump 31 pounds of pasta pumped into his stomach each day.
The ducks, and in France, geese, eventually develop a disease called hepatic lipidosis, their livers will swell up to twelve times its normal size....
Bowman says "there is this argument that ducks don't have a gag reflex and they eat large quantities during the winter. These ducks are regurgitating their food and that does not happen naturally.
For the past year and half the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida has been campaigning to raise awareness here in South Florida about what they say are the cruel methods used to create foie gras.
Sometimes, the ducks are so incapacitated they are eaten alive by rats.
"Because of their livers growing to such enormous quantities", says Bowman, "they are unable to stand they are unable to walk they are unable to defend themselves from rats who are gnawing at them alive."
While you can find the costly delicacy in at about two dozen upscale restraints around you'll no longer find foie gras at Escoppazo.
"Because of the way foie gras is produced", says Chef Giancarlo Bodoni, "I decided to discontinue it although I was for many, many years a foie gras lover myself."
And while Chef Bodoni *used* to serve foie gras to her discerning clientele, she has since had a change of heart, saying "I loved animals before people so for me to see the suffering is something hard to digest."
Chef Bodoni hopes other South Florida restraints follow suit...
and it looks like at least one other has.
At Johnny V on Las Olas in Ft. Lauderdale you can stick a fork in foie gras. Chef Vincenz watched the undercover video online and took foie gras off his menu.
While Vincenz was willing to remove foie gras from his menu, some of the other Chefs CBS4 spoke with insisted that what happens on foie gras farms is no different than what happens in any other slaughterhouse.
Chef Bodoni says she has gone organic, only purchasing free-range, natural grass-feed animals for her meats.
15 countries around the world such as Israel, the UK, and Austria have banned foie gras, the State of California passed legislation to ban all sale and production by 2012. Oregon, Illinois and New York are considering similar legislation.
Florida is not.
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)