A crackdown on foie gras is welcome news, but where is the outrage on cruel farming practices in the UK?
The Queen’s Speech unveiled a proposal to limit the sale of foie gras after years of public outrage against the product, but why are we still turning away from the suffering of animals used for food on our own doorstep?
Earlier this week, the government announced that it would look into banning the sale of foie gras as part of a new plan to “improve standards and eradicate cruel practices” for animals in the UK and abroad.
The ‘Action Plan for Animal Welfare’, which will see non-human animals recognised as sentient beings in law for the first time, promises to “consider further steps to limit the trade and sale of foie gras” along with other measures like ‘improving standards in zoos’ and ‘tackling puppy smuggling’.
The foie gras proposal is vague, unclear and certainly doesn’t go far enough - but there is no denying that it is a welcome and extremely overdue move in the right direction.
While foie gras production is banned in the UK, importing it and serving it in restaurants is currently legal.
The product is made from the liver of a duck or goose and often served in the form of a pâté. It is produced using a technique called gavage, which entails force-feeding the birds - usually by shoving a tube down their throats two or three times a day - to enlarge their liver.
Vegans and meat-eaters have long been united in their belief of the unimaginable cruelty of foie gras, and many non-vegans will - rightfully - refuse to eat it. The move to ban the product completely comes after years of collective outrage and controversy surrounding it.
But there is undeniable hypocrisy when it comes to the public’s attitude towards foie gras, which is neither produced nor typically eaten in the UK, in that this outrage isn’t reflected towards cruel practices within the flesh, dairy and egg industries in this country.
The discourse on animal rights in this country is puzzling, to put it mildly. We claim to be a nation of animal lovers who stand against animal cruelty, and our outrage about foie gras exists because of our understanding that animals feel pain and have the capacity to suffer.
This outrage is absolutely correct, but it should by no means be limited to foie gras. The cruelty that comes with its production is undeniable and unimaginable, but it is not isolated.
Inflicting pain on animals, mutilating them, and killing them in horrific ways are all common practice in the UK meat, dairy and egg industries.
Around 40 million newborn male chicks a year are killed by being ground up alive in electric mincers or gassed to death. This is standard practice in the egg industry, including so-called ‘free-range’ farms, as their sex means they cannot lay eggs and are surplus to requirements. Female chicks are kept alive, but will often have their beaks painfully mutilated, a process called ‘debeaking’.
Piglets have their tails cut off and teeth clipped or pulled out, lambs are castrated and have their tails docked, and cows have their horns burnt off with irons. These are standard practices in factory farms in the UK and aren’t confined to a few ‘bad’ ones.
An investigation earlier this month by Animal Equality UK into a so-called ‘high welfare’ farm in Scotland - published in the Independent on May 2 - is a recent and stark reminder of the horrors prevalent in UK farms.
Piglets were shown writhing and gasping after being attacked by hammers, and mother pigs were seen suffering from torn and swollen vulvas and prolapses - reportedly resulting from forced impregnation. In one harrowing bit of footage, a mother pig was forced to walk for two minutes to her death while her uterus and organs were protruding from her body.
This investigation is just one recent example, and the tip of the iceberg of cruelty on UK farms.
As well as being subjected to a life of pain, an overwhelming number of the country’s farmed animals spend their entire lives in cages not large enough for them to turn round in.
Around 42 per cent of the egg-laying hens in the UK are kept in cages too small to spread their wings, and pigs are often kept in farrowing crates - which are often only marginally larger than them - and not allowed to nurture their babies.
We are told that this country operates a ‘humane slaughter’ process for the 1.2 billion land animals killed for food each year, but this is - in essence - a marketing tactic. Animals are supposedly stunned before they’re killed, but rampant ineffective stunning means animals often feel everything and are writhing, kicking, and squealing in pain when they have their throats cut.
The government’s Action Plan for Animal Welfare does contain vague plans to ‘examine’ the uses of cages for poultry and pigs and ‘improve’ welfare at slaughter in the UK, but there doesn’t seem to be concrete proposals to tackle the fundamental cruelty that the animal farming industry entails. The only correct response to the recognition of animal sentience is to stop using animals for food entirely, but the limited public outrage about these practices means they look set to continue.
Some people may argue that the subjective difference in the levels of cruelty of these practices justifies their lack of outrage - this certainly seems to be the conclusion that some of the general public and lawmakers have come to.
But if - in your opinion - force-feeding geese is ‘crueller’ than crushing baby chicks alive, that doesn’t justify outrage over one and acceptance of the other. We shouldn’t be having a conversation about whose imprisonment and death is more or less excruciating, but one about the fact that they shouldn’t be caged and killed at all. We should be outraged by every infringement on animal rights that exists in the industries where animals are used for food.
People in this country love to tell ourselves that we, unlike other countries whose practices we speak out against, are bastions when it comes to animal welfare. But the only difference is that our systems of cruelty are hidden behind closed doors to shield them from the outrage that foie gras is met with.
Polly Foreman is a writer and digital journalist based in London. Since going vegan in 2014, Polly has stood firmly against all forms of animal oppression and exploitation. She is passionate about tackling misconceptions of veganism and challenging accepted norms about the way we use animals in this country.
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