Farm is around an hour north of montreal, full cycle farm, which is interesting. Not only raising ducks, but actual insemination and crossbreeding of muscovy drakes and pekin females,resulting in mulard ducks. This is followed by laying, incubation and raising, all the way through life, then 2 weeks of gavage before slaughter. The slaughterhouse is also owned by them. Clean, multi-million dollar affair, one of only a few in north america. Its key for them to exhibit their enterprise, as they wereinvestigated in 2007 after a video of"foie gras cruelty" was filmed partly at their farm in Quebec. The owners were almost definitely not involved, and none of the cruelty in the video seems institutionalized, rather the acts of a couple irresponsible employees who clearly don't think of the ducks as anything close to an animal. Though I strongly disagree with the treatment exhibited in the video, it seems to me to have nothing to do with foie gras production at all. Better hiring practices could help, and so could parents raising their children to respect the fact that something with a nervous system can suffer, but I hardly see how the farm can help in that respect. This farm produces a particular commodity, and upon visitation, the commodity didn't seem to have anything to do with any negative practice. Alot of farms are guilty of the same ills in animal husbandry, foie gras notwithstanding.
The link to the video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ozws-u4xb0
The only valid criticisms I would accept of foie gras at this point is that the unnatural feeding process the ducks undergo is likely to make them susceptible to illness, but as it is performed in a hermetic environment, and with only 14 days left to go in their lives, this problem does not seem of ethical consequence. A second acceptable criticism is that I didn't see the ducks live outdoors at all. Though they have plenty of room in their barn, I prefer animals to enjoy at least in some small respect what living a natural life may have been like. The third and final criticism acceptable is the slaughter of female chicks due to their inability to produce a decent lobe of foie. This is not only preposterously wasteful, ethically distasteful and economically stupid, it's also the opening part of the video, and if that is in fact the way they kill the female chicks, then I do have a HUGE problem with it. Though I rather doubt they bag them just to suffocate them and pour them back out of the bag into the bins, which doesn't logically follow, I am genuinely interested in how they dispose of the chicks. In our tour, this was one point of contention. Due to their downy coat and venal structure, female mulard ducks aren't used to produce foie gras. Our guide told us that they are in discussions with a Jamaican farm about taking the chicks down there raising and eventual slaughter. I'm curious as to why they don't have another farm just for female ducks to be raised and used for meat. Though the breasts are smaller, there is nevertheless a simple enough alternative. Free ducklings are nothing to snuff at. Before somebody comments saying that this practice of eliminating females means the farm can't be cyclical, it should be stated that muscovy and pekin crosses(Mulard) are the donkeys of the duck world. Though they live and produce huge livers, they cannot reproduce.
If the disposal of the females wasn't such a concern, this farm is much less guilty of ills than some of the normal livestock operations I visited in my travels. I certainly have less objection to this than the concentration of cattle in feedlots in Alberta, or battery chickens. I feel that the protests surrounding these ducks and their treatment is protestors grasping at the easiest targets because they are stigmatized, and have an instinctual link to something that humans wouldn't feel comfortable with.
All I really am trying to say is this: Foie gras CAN be produced without doing anything ethically reprehensible. I'm not defending this farm in particular, and certainly not the practices in the Global Action Network video. I am defending the product. It is symptomatic of a non-transparent food system that we have animal cruelty issues, it has nothing to do with Foie gras. Protesters who concentrate solely on this product aren't real protesters at all. The more people make a real connection with their farmers, and know their food and the manner in which it is raised, the less animal cruelty there will be. Now that this little rant is behind me, here is a video to back me up. This is proper foie gras. Also met this guy a few weeks ago, more on that in the NY posts.
I raised the subject of this Spanish dude with some Rougie reps in Vancouver and they told me he was "unrealistic" and commercially useless, because it couldn't be reproduced on a large scale and his livers weren`t as large as theirs. That seems like an explanation, but all it made me realize that I hate people who want everything on a large scale. Maybe there is something to small operations, oh yeah, the fact that they generally do things right, with oversight, and respect. Oh well.
Besides the obvious stuff where I bash protesters and production companies alike(they both do bad stuff) and don`t really offer solutions either will be happy with, there were some really cool parts about the farm. In particular, the incubation chambers, which are around 45 years old, but mimic a mother ducks action around her eggs, were very cool. The slaughterhouse was pretty much the same as one for chickens, only built a bit sturdier for the bigger birds. Another really cool part was their packing machine, which has two separate strips, one black plastic backing, and one dimpled clear plastic, which form the sides of the package, it does the entire packing plant job itself, even trimming the edges to make clean rectangles with duck breast's directly in the middle. This single machine was probably worth around 10,000$. The business of Foie, though maligned with protests, is clearly a healthy one. For people, anyways. So that's my Foie Gras page. For the record, I just bought the french version of Martin Picard's Wild Chef, timing being so appropriate for a Foie gras moment. It gets delivered in a couple weeks, I'm psyched.
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