Hugs for Puppies
Katherine Mangu-Ward | June 6, 2007, 12:29pm
Hugs for Puppies is the actual name of an animal rights group in Phiadelphia that has been making headlines by picketing restaurants that serve foie gras in a bid to make Philly foie-gras free, like Chicago:
[Chef David] Ansill cq, who owns the boutique restaurants Ansill and Pif, called the protests "self-defeating. People who didn't know what foie gras is, now they are interested in trying it. We sell a little more when they are out here. I thought about hiring them."...
He added that at Ansill, "it is one of our signature dishes, shirred eggs with truffles and cream with a little piece of foie gras on top. But I have now made the foie gras optional on that dish. . . . I'm not forcing anybody to eat it. If you want to eat it, eat it. If you don't, don't."
Hug for Puppies are well-known troublemakers:
In 2004, an FBI task force raided [a house shared by many Hugs for Puppies members], searching for materials related to a campaign to shut down an animal-testing company. Cooney and other members targeted Huntingdon Life Sciences, protesting at its New Jersey headquarters and at the homes of employees and business associates. Cooney also was accused in 2004 of violating a court order restricting protests against a corporate executive.
More foie gras follies here, here, and here.
GILMORE | June 6, 2007, 2:08pm | #
1) Fuck ducks
2) Hugs for puppies has an *annual report*
http://www.hugsforpuppies.org/downloads/2006Report.pdf
They spent 34% of their 2006 budget on 'miscellaneous'. :) ahh. sweet miscellany.
These people are a real party. Stupid magnets!
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Cops Failed us, Say Le Bec-Fin Foie Gras 4
From the Philadelphia Inquirer
By Stu Bykofsky | May 21, 2007
THEY CAME TO Le Bec-Fin to protest despicable foie gras and received despicable treatment from cops and a drunken flasher, they say.
The Foie Gras 4 - Dezeray Rubinchik, Mark Fonda, Deanna Calderaio and David Lambdon - picketed the expensive, exclusive French restaurant Friday, May 11, to protest foie gras on the menu.
Foie gras is French for "fatty liver." To make it, helpless male ducks are force-fed up to four pounds of grain by having tubes jammed down their throats two or three times a day for two weeks. The "feedings" stress the duck's liver, exploding it up to 10 times normal size.
That's torture, the protesters say.
After notifying the police's Civil Affairs Unit they would picket Le Bec-Fin, they arrived around 8 p.m. and began shouting and chanting along the curb. They can be loud.
Civil Affairs had not arrived, but within a few minutes a police car pulled up. Two uniformed cops got out and observed.
Problems began when a Le Bec-Fin patron - a fiftyish, big-bellied, white male, well-dressed and drunk, according to all accounts - left Le Bec-Fin and got in Rubinchik's face. "At 6-5, the man was quite intimidating as he stood so close to me, yelling in my face," says Rubinchik, 29.
The two cops didn't twitch.
By several accounts, the man screamed, jumped and danced around on the sidewalk, yelling, "This is what foie gras did to me."
He fell, Rubinchik says, got up screaming and then fell twice more, possibly on purpose.
The two cops didn't twitch.
Fearing for her safety, Rubinchik asked them to detain the oaf for being drunk or disorderly.
The two cops twitched.
"We were then told to 'f--- off' " by Officer Chisholm, says Rubinchik, who took names - Chisholm's partner's name was Wallace - and notes. She's filed a complaint with the 9th District.
The drunk then stepped inside Le Bec-Fin and "pulled out his penis for nearly 10 seconds and pushed it against the glass door at us while he snickered and jeered," says Rubinchik. He "was shaking it at us," says Calderaio, 29.
That sickened her more than foie gras.
When protesters asked the cops to arrest the flasher for indecent exposure, instead of service they got abuse. Chisholm "told us to 'go f--- yourselves,' " Rubinchik says.
The flasher was allowed to slip away through Le Bec-Fin's back door. I left messages asking chef/owner Georges Perrier to identify the prize package, but he did not respond.
Neither did the Police Department, when I called to speak to Wallace and Chisholm. However, Internal Affairs confirmed that its officers are investigating Rubinchik's complaint.
So is the ACLU.
Three observers confirmed the protesters' account. Philadelphia schoolteacher Diana Eberhardt, 58, saw the fracas unfold after returning a DVD to TLA Video. She says the drunk was "aggressive" and was "harassing" the Foie Gras 4.
When Eberhardt asked police to step in, they refused. When she asked again, she says, Officer Wallace told her, "If you don't leave, I'll put you in the car."
She stood her ground - and Wallace put the totally innocent bystander in the police car, observers told me.
Rubinchik yelled for him to arrest her instead, and Chisholm "pushed me with two hands," she says.
Eberhardt was released after a half-hour by a just-arriving Civil Affairs sergeant, who apologized for the bad treatment.
A witness who was watching from across Walnut Street, Emily Scanlon, 24, tells me the flasher was being "drunk and obnoxious" for 20 minutes. When he loosened his pants, she thought he was going to moon the crowd, but "he pulled his genitals out and shook them."
Another witness, Samantha Tramontina, 23, calls it "insulting" and says "he was trying to start a fight with the protesters."
If what the observers and protesters say checks out, Chisholm and Wallace need extra training, starting with a lecture about how their badge means they are to protect citizens, not bully them.
E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns:
http://go.philly.com/byko."
Stevo Darkly | June 6, 2007, 5:01pm | #
So, different species have different qualities. They also have similar ones. Neither observation contributes to the argument. What specific difference in bird physiology prevents them from feeling pain from repeated force-feeding?
Actually, I just felt compelled to look this up -- not just because I am a dick (although I can be), but because I actually like animals and would honestly like to know whether these animals are suffering.
From
Force Feeding: An Examination of Available Scientific Evidence (PDF file!)
------ begin quote ------
A. Does Force-Feeding Cause Stress?
... Stress levels in birds can be gauged through the measurement of corticosterone blood levels. ... In measuring corticosterone levels of ducks kept in group pens, clinical study showed no significant increase in stress levels except after the first instance of force-feeding and strongly suggested that increased stress measurements resulted from holding the ducks rather than from the actual force-feeding. ...
B. Assessing Claims that Force-feeding Induces Pain
The presence of pain in animals may be difficult to measure scientifically because animals can only express themselves through behavior. Neuroscience, however, provides information about the nervous system that can help us to assess the incidence of pain. Experiments involving the visceral nervous system, which computes sensory and motor information from organs including the digestive tract and related secretary glands, have been carried out to assess potential signs of pain in ducks at different stages of the force-feeding period (Servière et al., 2002).
Neural activation indicating the presence of pain signals were never detected in the sensory visceral brain centers of force-fed ducks (Servière et al., 2003). Although there is a need for further scientific investigations, the data provided do not demonstrate the presence of major pain-induced signs in the nervous system of force-fed mule ducks.
[Why no pain?] This absence of pain indicators likely results from anatomical specificity of the waterfowl involved in foie gras production. For example, ducks and geese, like many other bird species, are able to swallow large preys. Consequently, the inside diameter of the upper part of the esophagus, which is essentially an expandable elongated pouch in waterfowl, the pseudo-crop sac, is comparatively larger than in mammals and is not circled by cartilaginous rings, explaining the capacity to swallow large objects. Its volume ranges from 600 to 800 cm3 in mule ducks (Guy), while it is reported to be smaller in geese (below 500 cm3) (Leprettre etal., 2002). For this reason, each meal with geese will have a smaller volume than with mule ducks, though the number of daily meals with geese will be higher. In addition, this pouch is located at the level of the neck (25-35cm long) allowing full expansion under the elastic skin of the neck, without any compression of the organs present in the thoracic cavity. It also allows the birds to potentially absorb large amounts of food, which is stored there before being progressively released. The pseudo-crop sac membrane is covered with keratin, which provides a mechanical resistance capacity much higher than the epithelium of most mammals. Another specificity resides in the fact that the opening of the trachea sits in the middle of the tongue. Thanks to the collapsing action of tongue muscles since this anatomical feature allows ducks to eat and absorb water under the water without drowning. This specificity explains why, as long as the procedure is carried under proper conditions, ducks do not have the upper respiratory tract blocked by the force fed meal, a criticism which is often raised by opponents. ...
C. Are Ducks and Geese Frightened by the Force-Feeder and/or Force-Feeding?
... In mule ducks, the response was more ambiguous. Generally, mule ducks are fearful, social and very sensitive to any environmental factors (e.g., change of the experimenter or in the timetable) that will affect behavioral responses. Additional experimentation, however, demonstrated that the flight distance of ducks [i.e., how close you could get to them before they tried to escape] was higher in front of an unknown person than with the caretaker who performed force-feeding daily (Faure etal., 2001). Empirical observations with geese delivered similar results. Furthermore, there was no development of aversion to the operator throughout the force-feeding period. In fact,the flight distance lessened with time. Moreover, familiarization limited the amplitude of the physiological responses to physical stress (Guémené et al., 2002; Servière et al., 2003), as well as behavioral reactions of fear in specific experimental tests (Guémené et al., 2002;2006).
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