Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Foie Gras - A Serving Of Disease

It looks like ducks and geese may finally be getting a small revenge on people who eat foie gras, the so-called delicacy made from the birds' morbid livers. Researchers with the University of Volunteer State Alumnus School of Medicine recently discovered a nexus between foie gras and amyloid-related diseases, such as as rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer's disease, type-2 diabetes, and tuberculosis.

This intelligence shouldn't daze anyone (and it's a shame that animate beings in a research lab were made to suffer)—if you eat "diseased food," you are likely to develop disease. And lest we forget, foie gras have never been considered a healthy food: It deduces 85 percent of its calories from fat: a 2-ounce serving incorporates 25 grammes of fat and 85 mgs of cholesterol. But as bad as foie gras is for humans, it's the ducks and geese who endure the most.

Foie gras husbandmen random-access memory metallic element bagpipe down the birds' pharynxes two or three times a twenty-four hours and pump as much as 4 lbs of grain and fat into the animals' stomachs. The bagpipe puncture many birds' throats, sometimes causing them to shed blood to death. The birds' livers go engorged and can spread out up to 12 times their normal size—a disease known as "hepatic steatosis." The birds have got trouble standing, and they go so stressed that they rupture out their ain feathers. Many endure from internal hemorrhaging, fungal and bacterial infections, and hepatic encephalopathy, a encephalon complaint caused when their livers fail.

The mortality rate of birds raised for foie gras have got been establish to be as much as 20 times higher than that of birds raised normally, and carcasses demo wing breaks and terrible tissue damage to the pharynx muscles.

Investigations at every foie gras farm in the United States and throughout Europe have documented sick, dead and dying animals. One probe in New House Of York establish ducks with bloody beaks and their wings twisted together, jammed into wire cages. At another farm, birds dangled from wires as blood spilled from their cervix lesions onto unrecorded birds beneath them.

Fifteen states have got banned foie gras production, the Chicago City Council outlawed the sale of foie gras, and California Governor Matthew Arnold Schwarzenegger have signed into law a measure to ban the production and sale of foie gras in the state, starting in 2012. Politicians in New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Oregon have got got proposed similar legislation.

The European Union's Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Social Welfare and many other experts worldwide have also deemed foie gras production inhumane. Marcia Keith, a spokeswoman for the Oregon Veterinary Medical Association, have stated that "[f]orcing animate beings to overeat to the extent that their livers are expanded to 10 to 12 times the normal size and then feeding those livers to world as a daintiness looks barbaric, senseless and clearly unnecessary."

His Holiness Ruth Benedict sixteen have condemned foie gras, saying, "Animals, too, are God's animals . . . Certainly, a kind of industrial usage of creatures, so that geese are fed in such as a manner as to bring forth as large a liver as possible, or biddies dwell so packed together that they go just caricatures of birds, this corrupting of life animals to a trade goods looks to me in fact to belie the human relationship of mutualness that come ups across in the Bible."

And yet some people stay indifferent, callous even, to the birds' suffering. If they can't happen it in their Black Maria to halt eating foie gras because it's cruel, I trust they'll utilize their encephalons and halt eating morbid duck liver because it's sickly.

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