Le Gavage

We headed towards Rocamadour, the east end of our Dordogne trip. The distance between La Roque-Gageac and Rocamadour is not that far, but it took us almost 2 hours due to the windy mountain roads and the accidental force-feed tour.

We didn’t intentionally look for a force-feed tour, even though we’d been joking about it. During the drive, I voiced my desire of taking a photo of a beautiful blue-roofed, cliff-clinging castle. It took David some searching, but he finally parked at a safe spot with a good view of the castle. What we didn’t expect was that we parked right in front of a little goose farm (behind the wired fence, they quacked at us viciously); a little sign on the fence informing us that the force-feed would happen in 15 minutes at somewhere nearby and everyone was welcome to visit. It was an opportunity too good to pass by, so off we went for our first force-feed tour.

When we arrived at the old Monsieur ’s little barn, he was in the middle of his daily force-feed routine. David and Loïc greeted him and asked him various related questions; this nice old man answered them all and added some of his own opinions (“Geese are much better than ducks, but you gotta do what you gotta do.”). We were surprised by his operation; it wasn’t scary or cruel as what we had pictured, even though we already knew that geese and ducks here are treated much better than the US’s livestock.

He force-fed his geese only when they were ready (probably years, since the ones we saw were HUGE). In a giant barrel, he warmed up corn and softened it with water for easier digestion. He fed it to his geese and ducks 3 times a day for 21 days. He fed each goose for total 5 ~ 6 seconds of corn, and between each mouthful of food, he gently massaged its neck to help the food go down easier. He repeated the same 20-second process over and over. There was no cage, no tube attached to each goose/duck’s mouth 24 hours a day. In fact, the force-fed geese went directly back to play with their buddies.

We forgot to ask him if he clipped their wings. We couldn’t decide if the geese we saw earlier were just too lazy to fly away or if they weren’t able to. Other than that, we learned quite a bit about the force-feed business at our 10-minute tour, and the old Monsieur got a little human companion.

[10/16/2006 Update] From our friend Penny:

“That was an interesting account. I’d always had the impression that it wasn’t as bad as the animal rights people make it out to be. For one thing, geese and ducks have calcified throats and no gag response, so putting a tube down their throats is not hurting them. And they gorge themselves in the wild every year in preparation for migration anyway so the idea of doing that in a controlled way in captivity isn’t that unnatural. The animal rights people are really misguided – those ducks and geese raised for foie gras have much better lives than poultry raised for food, which are crammed into small cages and have very short miserable lives. If the activists care so much about bird welfare, they should be going after the poultry farmers, not the foie gras producers. I always think that the reason why they went after foie gras was because it was a low-hanging fruit, a rare luxury item that most people have never had and don’t care that much about. The hypocrites are too sissy to take on the big poultry producers where there are real issues concerning cruelty to animals.”

“I heard somewhere that the reason why the birds don’t fly away is because they need a lot of space to run up to speed before they can fly – sort of like a runway for an airplane.  In the farms apparently there isn’t space for them to run a straight path to accelerate to speed so they can’t fly away.  That’s what I heard or read someplace, don’t remember where.”