Activists Protest Firehouse Restaurant For Animal Cruelty

Demonstration will highlight restaurant’s sale of diseased livers from mistreated ducks

Sacramento, Calif. (May 21, 2010) – Activists with In Defense of Animals (IDA), the Animal Protection and Rescue League (APRL), and Sacramento Animal Rights will be protesting outside of Firehouse Restaurant in Sacramento today at 6:00 p.m. against the sale of foie gras – diseased, enlarged livers from mistreated, force-fed ducks.

The activists will be displaying graphic banners showing scenes from inside foie gras farms.
What: Demonstration against foie gras
When: Friday, May 21, 6 p.m.
Where: Firehouse Restaurant, 1112 2nd St., Sacramento, CA 95814

To make the livers fat enough for foie gras, workers restrain the ducks, force long metal pipes down their throats, and pump up to two pounds of food into them per day. After three weeks, their livers swell up to 12 times their normal size.

“As a veterinarian, I find foie gras to be a disease rather than a delicacy,” said Elliot Katz, DVM, President of IDA. “The liver’s function is to process toxins, and a liver in this grossly enlarged state from force feeding cannot function properly.”

“The conditions I witnessed at Hudson Valley Foie Gras are appalling,” states Bryan Pease, Esq., Board Chair of APRL. “In visiting there and other farms to document conditions, I saw ducks panting incessantly and showing great difficulty walking and breathing in the later stages of force feeding, and I saw trash barrels full of dead ducks killed by the process.”

Animal cruelty investigations by APRL and a lawsuit filed by APRL and IDA led to enactment of California Health & Safety Code section 25980, banning the sale or production of foie gras in California effective 2012. The cities of San Francisco, Berkeley, West Hollywood, Solana Beach and San Diego have passed resolutions in support of the ban.

In 2009, the National Advertising Division of the Better Business Bureau found that D’Artagnan, a major U.S. foie gras distributor, was engaging in false advertising by claiming the livers are not diseased and implying the animals are treated humanely.

More information is available at www.foie-gras-industry.com.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contacts: Linda Middlesworth 916-798-5516 graphside@aol.com
Bryan Pease (619) 723-0369 Bryan@APRL.org