Voices for Animals (formerly Voices for Animal Liberation), Pittsburgh’s only grassroots, all-volunteer animal rights organization has been busy making good on their 2004 New Years resolution to do everything they can to encourage local restaurants, grocery stores, and distributors to stop selling or serving foie gras. Foie gras is the grossly enlarged livers of ducks or geese produced through barbarically shoving a pipe down the animals’ throats and pumping up to a third of the creature’s body weight into their stomachs everyday. The process forces the liver to become diseased and enlarged – up to twelve times its normal size – and involves not only abusive force-feeding, but other torment as well. The animals are kept in intensive and filthy confinement where none of their natural desires and needs – like swimming, socializing with members of their own species, nesting, and grazing – can be met. Instead the animals live in windowless sheds, and never see the outdoors until they are stuffed into crowded crates to be carted off to their premature deaths.

Luckily for ducks and geese, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find foie gras on the menus of local establishments – precisely what we aimed to do. We have managed to encourage 8 restaurants to pull foie gras from their establishments. A recent investigation conducted by GourmetCruelty.com of the two largest foie gras farms in the U.S. (there are only three) revealed horrendous abuse and this documented footage of the animals’ plight has been used to show local business owners, chefs and consumers exactly what they are supporting every time they buy or eat the diseased livers of ducks or geese.

Voices for Animals needs your help to continue achieving success on behalf of the animals forced to suffer and die unnecessarily for mere palate preference. Three ways to fight foie gras:

1. Go Vegetarian! Ducks and geese on foie gras farms aren’t the only animals who endure abusive living conditions and die violently at the hands of agriculture. No sentient being – whether mammal, bird, or fish goes willingly to their untimely ends. The best way to take a stand against cruelty to other animals is to stop consuming the products derived from that cruelty. Visit www.TryVeg.com for more information.
    
2. Tell these local establishments that cruelty is not a delicacy! Politely write and call the following restaurants and ask them to stop selling or serving foie gras. Let us know if you hear of other establishments engaged in selling or promoting this gourmet cruelty.

   Christine Dauber, Owner
   Mark Collins, Chef Laforet
   Jeremy Carlisle, Manager
   Le Pommier
   2104 E. Carson Street
   Pittsburgh, PA 15203
   (412) 431-1901

   Michael Uricchio, Owner
   5701 Bryant Street
   Pittsburgh, PA 15206
   (412) 665-9000
    

3. Join Us! We have weekly educational leafleting and demonstrations for our Foie gras-Free Pittsburgh campaign, as well as the other animal rights issues we are working on. Visit: www.PghFoieGras.com for more information, or contact us at: Pghfoiegras@yahoo.com