Thousands of Ducks Die on Farm Supplying Gordon Ramsay–Licensed Restaurant

PETA Asks Chef to Swear Off Foie Gras After Violent Force-Feeding, Deaths, and Slaughter Found on Supplier’s Factory Farm

For Immediate Release:
May 8, 2013

Contact:
Shakira Croce 202-483-7382

New York — A new PETA investigation of Hudson Valley Foie Gras, which supplies Manhattan restaurant Gordon Ramsay at The London, has revealed shocking cruelty to ducks at the factory farm, which calls itself the “premier producers of foie gras” in the U.S. PETA has sent flamboyant celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay—who has rejected some of the pork industry’s worst factory-farming practices on his show The F Word—a request to stop selling foie gras. PETA included video footage revealing 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 the birds’ 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.

“Every exposé of foie gras farms has revealed how grotesquely cruel it is to jam pipes down birds’ throats and force-feed them until they sicken and die,” says PETA Senior Research Associate Dan Paden. “We hope Gordon Ramsay and other chefs will swear off this particular ‘F-word’—foie gras—for good.”

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.