Foie Gras Controversy Results in Court Battle Animal Rescuers Charged with Felony Burglary, Facing Seven Years in Prison

Liberty, NY (PRWEB) October 27, 2004

Ryan Shapiro, Campaigns Coordinator for the animal protection organization GourmetCruelty.com was arraigned this past week (Tuesday, Oct. 19) on charges of felony burglary. He has been released on his own recognizance. Shapiro is facing a possible seven years in prison. He is the second GourmetCruelty.com volunteer to be charged in the case (NYS v. Blum), which stems from the organization’s undercover investigation of the Hudson Valley Foie Gras factory farm and the rescue of injured and suffering ducks from the farm.

Sarahjane Blum, Media Spokesperson for the group was arrested on April 23, 2004, after screening GourmetCruelty.com’s undercover documentary Delicacy of Despair: Behind the Closed Doors of the Foie Gras Industry at New York State’s Syracuse University. She is also charged with felony burglary and facing seven years in prison.

On foie gras factory farms, ducks are confined in crowded pens and tiny isolation cages, so small they cannot spread their wings or turn around. Three times a day, the ducks are callously grabbed by workers and have a long metal pipe shoved down their throat through which they are force fed up to a pound of food. This process of force-feeding causes the disease hepatic lipidosis, which causes the liver to expand to up to 12 times its healthy size. The diseased liver is then sold as the delicacy “foie gras.”

Currently, only two companies in the United States produce foie gras—New York’s own Hudson Valley Foie Gras and California’s Sonoma Foie Gras. This year, California has taken steps to shut down its foie gras industry.

Ryan Shapiro comments on the irony: “Even as we are facing seven years in prison in New York for our role in exposing the suffering that occurs behind the closed doors of foie gras factory farms, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a bill into law that will ban the unspeakable cruelty of force-feeding of birds on factory farms in his state.” The legislation, SB1520, was signed into law on September 29, 2004. California Senate Pro-Tem John Burton, who introduced the bill, declared foie gras production “unnecessary and inhumane.”

New York state currently has a similar bill before its legislature (A1821/S5153), which would make the force-feeding of birds for food a criminal act.

Sarahjane Blum states: “This bill is long overdue. Ducks raised for foie gras live a life of suffering and torture. If the abuses these ducks suffer were forced upon dogs or cats, the perpetrators would be prosecuted instead of the animal defenders.”

For more information contact:

Sarahjane Blum

GourmetCruelty.com Media Outreach

Sarahjane@GourmetCruelty.com

240-447-9792

Photos and video available upon request

GourmetCruelty.com is a Washington, DC based non-profit animal protection organization dedicated to exposing the truth of factory farming through undercover investigation, and educating the public about vegetarian living.

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