Thousands of Ducks Die on Foie Gras Farm Supplying Bay Area Restaurant

PETA Wants La Folie to Halt Illegal Foie Gras Sales After Violent Force-Feeding, Deaths, and Slaughter Found on Supplier’s Factory Farm

For Immediate Release:
May 9, 2013

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

San Francisco — PETA has sent a letter to Roland Passot, the owner of San Francisco restaurant La Folie, cautioning him that PETA will pursue legal avenues if the restaurant continues foie gras sales in violation of California’s ban on selling the product. The group’s action comes in the wake of its just-released investigation of Hudson Valley Foie Gras, the factory farm in upstate New York that supplies La Folie and calls itself the “premier producer” of foie gras in the U.S. Video footage from the investigation reveals how Hudson Valley Foie Gras workers shove steel tubes down ducks’ throats and pump huge amounts of grain into their bodies three times a day, every day, for weeks in order to sicken and enlarge their livers. At slaughter, ducks are hung upside down, have their throats slit, and are left to bleed to death.

Experts have found that force-feeding causes esophageal tears and splits, liver rupture and failure, heat stress, and aspiration pneumonia—and by the company’s own calculation, some 15,000 ducks on the farm die every year before they make it to slaughter.

“PETA’s investigation reveals that the source of the foie gras that La Folie sells as a ‘secret chef special’ is a factory farm where ducks are violently force-fed and where thousands of birds drop dead every year,” says PETA Senior Research Associate Dan Paden. “This cruelty is why California banned the sale of foie gras—and common decency is why La Folie must stop selling it.”

This was not PETA’s first visit to a New York foie gras factory farm. In 1991, at a farm that was later acquired by Hudson Valley Foie Gras, PETA investigators revealed cruel force-feeding and countless sick and injured ducks, including one whose maggot-covered neck wound was so severe that water spilled out of it when he drank.

For more information, please visit PETA.org or click here.