If meat is murder, what is foie gras?

Out in California, those who raise ducks for foie gras are being targeted by animal rights extremists:

The attacks began in Mill Valley in late July, when vandals went to the home of Mr. Manrique, 38, who is also the chef and a co-owner of Sonoma Saveurs, putting acid on his car, gluing the lock on a door, and spray-painting slogans like "Stop or Be Stopped."

Most ominous, they left behind a videotape, taken through a window, showing Mr. Manrique and his family, including his 2-year-old son, playing in the house. Vandals also struck at the home of Mr. Manrique's French-born partner, Didier Jaubert, 46. Sonoma Saveurs is owned by the two men, their wives and Guillermo Gonzalez, 51, and his wife, Junny, who also own Sonoma Foie Gras, the only foie gras maker in the Western United States. On Aug. 12, the activists attacked the cafe with spray paint and flooded the premises — to symbolize, they said on a Web site, the damage done to ducks' digestive systems by forcibly swelling their livers. . .

The vandalism and thefts are part of an escalation of violence by animal rights extremists around California. Two groups, the Revolutionary Cells and the Animal Liberation Brigade, claimed responsibility for a pair of pipe bombs that exploded on Aug. 28 at Chiron, a biotechnology firm in Emeryville, citing Chiron's connections to a company in New Jersey that uses animals to test pharmaceuticals. There were no injuries. In the last few years, the Animal Liberation Front has also been implicated in fires at a Santa Rosa chicken processing plant and a meatpacking plant and an egg farm in Petaluma, as well as in a burglary at a Farm Bureau office.

Earlier this year, crude incendiary devices were placed at a McDonald's in Chico (they didn't go off). "There has been an increase in activity and level of damage in which violence is being used to intimidate and coerce people," said LaRae Quy, an F.B.I. spokeswoman in San Francisco.

California is a stronghold of both animal rights activism and fine eating. This conflict is not going to go away any time soon.

According to the Times reporter, the force feeding does not appear cruel save in its results -- grossly obese ducks that can barely waddle. I don't care for foie gras myself, but on the moral scale, I'm not sure the ducks' discomfort ultimately compares in importance to the fact that they are being raised to be killed and eaten.

Posted by David on September 24, 2003 1:22 PM