Your Daily Vegan

Sir Roger Moore, the original James Bond, is on a campaign to remove the foie gras from shelves of a major supermarket in the UK, Selfridges.  Get this, he sent a letter to the president of Selfriges, Galen Weston, saying he would buy their entire stock of foie gras as long as Weston agree to not restock the product.  Now that is pretty damn awesome.

Sir Roger Moore fights for the rights of ducks

Foie Gras is French for “fatty liver,” and is similar to a pate.  This so-called “delicacy” is produced by force-feeding ducks abnormally large quantities of food.  This causes their livers to become diseased and swell up to ten times (10 times!) the normal size.  That’s got to be comfortable for the duck, right?  After 28-days of force-feeding, the ducks are killed.  The livers are then marketed as foie gras.  It’s a practice that’s widely condemned, but it’s also widely consumed.

Twenty-eight days.  We torture these animals for twenty-eight days.  You know those people, the welfare type groups that fight so that animal production is more humane?  Bigger cages, cleaner factory farms, better stunning methods?  Tell me how we could ever produce this delicacy without severely torturing the animal.  Then someone else, maybe a fan of foie gras, could tell me how they could ever eat it knowing how it was produced.  Tell me why it’s necessary to torture these animals…for a pate?

I’ve talked about the cruelty of foie gras before.  Every time I read about it, I wonder how anyone could justify their actions on such senseless cruelty towards ducks and geese.  Then I immediately think of how many times I’ve seen it served on Top Chef.  Sigh.

Back to Sir Roger Moore though, he’s fantastic.  I appreciate his work (even if he did work with PETA) for this terrible practice.  There is also an interview with Moore talking about this project in the video below.

But before you click on the video, there are graphic images on the video.  Incidentally, Channel 4 News ran this video earlier with the same warning, only their warning was in bold.  It read, “Warning: The video report contains some disturbing images.” Why doesn’t that warning alone, click with people? If it’s disturbing to look at, it’s probably a good bet that it is way more than disturbing to feel. And those ducks can – feel.

via vegetarianstar.com

Photo courtesy of Peta.org

“What vegans know and what meat eaters and vegetarians often deny.”  Isn’t that great?  I love that.

More from Roger Yates at On Human-Nonhuman Relations:

On Saturday March 24, 2001, the Welsh edition of the Liverpool Daily Post featured a single large picture on its front page. Under the headline ‘HEARTBREAK’ a man is pictured standing in front of a cow. The man’s hand is raised, the cow’s head is raised too, as if she is trying to smell what the man holds in his hand. The smell is likely to be metallic because the man holds a primed captive bolt pistol. The gun is pointed at the head of the cow who is locked into a large red restraining device. The subtitle under the headline reads: ‘The chilling moment which graphically illustrates the horrific reality of the farm outbreak’. The caption under the photograph reads: ‘GRIM TRUTH: A slaughterman shoots a cow in Lamonby, Cumbria, yesterday. We apologise to readers who find this photograph distressing. After much thought, we decided to publish it to show the full effect of the foot-and-mouth crisis’.

Apart from the newspaper’s masthead, two adverts for the content of other pages and an advert at the bottom of the page for mobility scooters, the picture and the words above take up the whole of the tabloid-sized front page.

This is at the beginning of a great post on veganism that I think you should go read.  Right now.  It’s one of the most succinct essays that I’ve read in a long time.

The essay goes on to say:

As might be suspected, many meat eaters do not overtly recognise themselves as purchasers of parts of the carcasses of dead animals, just as meat eaters and vegetarians may not have the fact that they are consumers of animal products at the forefront of their minds. Apart from the case of some fishes, care is generally taken to remove eyes and heads or other parts that would result in ‘meat’ being seen as a piece of an animal (when does a pig end and a pork chop begin? – see Singer 1983: 165-66).[1] How many recognise that the white liquid lined up on the shelves is, first and foremost, baby food: the food of calves? However, despite this, or because of these points, one question I pose here is relatively blunt: why should people take active steps to know any of the details about the animal products that they intend to consume?

Yes, I agree.  How many of the omni’s think about what they are eating before they eat it?  My personal belief is that we can trace it back to the way we desensitize our children.  We teach that bacon isn’t a pig and a burger doesn’t come from a cow.  It’s always “Old MacDonald has a farm” but never “Old MacDonald has a factory farm.  See, because if our parents had told us that animals are tortured before they are horribly killed, most likely the children wouldn’t go near a hamburger.

I would encourage any meat eater to take some time to research where their food comes from.  Maybe once you open your eyes and see how gruesome it really is, you will open you mind to a more compassionate way of life.  I hope so, I really do.