Letters to the Editor
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I want my Uber Gras!
That would be the fattened liver of a duck or goose that has been force-fed...
(wait for it!)
FOIE GRAS!
Muahahahahahahahahahah!
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HSUS
Foie gras, despite being one of the best forms of humane livestock treatment
If this were really the whole story I doubt the HSUS would be supporting the ban, they are anything but a radical animal rights organization.
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Perhaps the Humane Society, to which I donate yearly, should use data from the United States largest producers and not that of the European Union or small producers in New York.
Every type of livestock production will have those that use abusive practices. The goal should be to humanely treat the animals, which the largest two farms in the US do.
Saying that animals in France are caged and die from rupture livers has no place in the debate because that's not the farms in question.
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Food for Thought
"The pain of being force-fed is God's way of punishing the ducks for being too stupid to get to the top of the food chain!"
If this is your argument, referencing God and the food chain, then you would have to know that we did not climb to the top of the chain, we were placed there.
And again, the biggest problem we have as Americans, in the eyes of the global community, is our arrogance. How we treat others, how we treat the most vulnerable, the most dependent, will inevitably come back to haunt us.
As the "biggest and strongest" what are we - benevolent leaders or malevolent dictators?
To those that speak of the humanity involved with the raising of animals. Do you work there? What is your experience inside the confines of agribusiness?
I believe that many people purposefully look the other way when faced with the truth behind the food they eat. The information is too prevalent, the visual images too abundant to ignore.
There are children being raped in Darfur because someone else is bigger, stronger and has a taste for it. They're bigger, stronger, does that make it acceptable? In some cultures, this is not a crime. Some dismiss it as a part of war. There will always be excuses for doing the wrong thing.
Incarcerating billions of animals in filth, squalor, pain and unnatural surroundings is our shame as a nation. Just because you can do something, does that mean you should?
Just because something feels or tastes good...does that mean it's OK? At what point does the self-gratification end? People are so far removed from the entire process that is involved in their meals. If they were involved it would change dramatically.
You cannot feign shock and horror when disease and contamination results. You cannot blithely go through your day blissfully unaware. There are too many resources at your fingertips now. We can excuse people's ignorance prior to the Internet, but there is just simply no excuse for it anymore.
You want what you want and consequences to yourself and to others be damned. It's a sad state of affairs, but it is the essence of our culture. Sure we can be nice people that step up in a crisis and help out others, but when asked to change on a daily basis some of the bad habits that are making us ill and perpetuating cruelty and it suddenly turns into a human rights and freedoms issue. No one is placing animals above humans, that's a cop out. That's a pathetic distraction maneuver that takes away from the legitimacy of the original argument.
At what point as human beings do we stop talking about our supremacy and behave accordingly?
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You ARE placing animals above humans
If you deny me foie gras you ARE placing animals above humans, even if you say noone is doing so.
Go eat a hamburger, Penny. You need sustenance. You are obviously delirious with hunger.
Eat a hamburger, it's the best thing for you.
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Penny, you are siding with Terrorists
"The most horrifying thing, though, was that they slipped into his backyard while he was at work and videotaped his wife and child cuddling inside their house and sent it to him."
The PETA types threaten a mother and child.
That's OK with you but Foie Gras is not OK with you.
You belong in a mental institution.
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Animal Ignorance
I believe that many people purposefully look the other way when faced with the truth behind the food they eat. The information is too prevalent, the visual images too abundant to ignore.
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No, Penny, that’s not the case.
What happens is that people like you, with little husbandry background, suddenly act shocked that animals are killed so we can eat them.
Many of us have picked out a calf or a shoat, shot it in the head, dragged it to a cross beam, hauled it up, slit its neck and drained its blood. Then we’ve skinned it, cut off large sections, and then cut up into smaller sections with band saws. Many of us actually have bone saws. We’ve also taken sections and ground them up for sausage, scrapping as much fat as we could find for flavor.
What we haven’t done is suddenly had some ignorance based epiphany and gasped that bacon comes from a once living and breathing pig.
You complain about the arrogance of the United States while displaying a smugness of knowledge that you have all the answers, and if people would only see that animals are alive that people stop eating meat.
We in the reality based community, both know that the animals we eat were once alive, and we also know animals well enough to not be surprised that animals protect their young, can learn tricks and have many amazing qualities. Since we know animals, we also don’t fall victim to anthropomorphizing these traits. We also don’t compare or equate eating ducks to the slaughter of women and children in Sudan, based on some misguided notion of strong verses weak.
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if "everyone knows" what's happening then I guess it wouldn't matter if everything that does happen was recorded
if the meat industry thought that doing that wouldn't affect sales then there would be no reason not to allow it would there. In fact, and surely anyone with the familiarity you have with the issue must know this, they fight against such documentation and accountability because they believe their survival depends upon preventing just such widespread awareness of the reality. Probably they are right.