Foie gras (pronounced 'fwah grah') has been exalted in some gourmet food circles as a prized delicacy, but if most people knew how foie gras is produced, they would be horrified.

Foie gras, the French term for "fatty liver," is the product of extreme animal cruelty. It is the swollen, diseased liver of ducks and geese who are force-fed just up until the point of death before being slaughtered. Birds suffer tremendously, both during and after the force-feeding process, as their physical condition rapidly deterioriates. In just a few weeks, their livers swell up to ten times their normal size, and the birds can scarcely stand, walk, or even breathe. At this point, they are slaughtered, and their livers are peddled as a "gourmet" delicacy.

The idea for this cruel force-feeding practice is thought to have originated in ancient Egypt, after people noticed that wild geese often gorge themselves before embarking on long migrations. Because Egyptians, and later Romans, considered the fat-laden flesh and organs of those geese caught after this pre-migration gorging to taste better, they sought to artificially induce and exaggerate this condition in captive geese. Thereafter, the practice of force-feeding took hold, later degenerating and devolving into what is now the modern foie gras industry.

In modern foie gras factory farms, geese and ducks are confined, usually in either small pens or in tiny cages that virtually lock the birds in place. Thus restrained, the birds cannot escape the "feeder" and the mechanized feeding machine. One by one, the feeder grabs each bird and plunges the metal pipe of the feeding machine down their throats. The machine pumps a huge amount of a corn-and-oil mixture directly into their gullets in just a few seconds, equivalent to one-third to one-fourth of the birds' own body weight each day.

This brutal treatment is devastating to the health of the birds. In a matter of weeks, their livers have swollen up to ten times their normal size. Breathing and walking become difficult as the liver pushes against other organs, causing respiratory stress due to decreased air sac space in their lungs, and forcing the legs to move outward at an unnatural angle. Ducks at foie gras farms have been observed panting and struggling to stand, using their wings to push themselves forward when their crippled legs can no longer support them. Struggling to move causes infection-prone open pressure sores to develop and fester on their hocks (legs) and keels (chest area).

In this compromised state, depressed birds can no longer engage in normal preening behaviors, and this is compounded by the fact that they are denied access to water sufficient for them to engage in normal, instinctual behaviors. Their plumage becomes encrusted with filth, and most of them develop what foie gras farmers call "wet neck"-when their unpreened feathers curl up and become coated with dirt and oil.

They also suffer, as do all factory-farmed ducks, from debilling, which is performed ostensibly to prevent them from pecking each other when they are so severely confined. Shortly after birth, a hot knife sears off the tips of their sensitive upper bills, slicing through tissue rich in nerve endings. Debilled poultry suffer from chronic pain for the rest of their lives, often having trouble eating and preening.

As a result of these egregious conditions, the birds suffer both physically and psychologically.

Dr. Castes of L'Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse describes this phenomenon further as "hepatic encephalopathy":

This is the result of an endogenous intoxication due to the hepatic impairment; the liver can no longer play its role as a circulatory filter. As a result, various metabolites appear in the blood that are usually stopped by the liver (ammonium, mercaptans, short-chain antigens) and that may then reach the central nervous system (particularly sensitive to these compounds) and trigger central nervous troubles such as:

• cerclage movements
• eptileptiform crisis
• Increase of the intracranial pressure accompanied by migraines, and finally stupor, coma and death

Not surprisingly, the mortality rate on foie gras farms can be up to 20 times higher than the death rate on conventional duck farms. Ducks can die when the metal feeding tube punctures their necks, when their stomachs literally "burst" from the enormous volume of food they are forced to ingest or when force-feeding overfills them to the point of suffocation. Necropsies performed on foie gras birds have shown them to suffer from grossly enlarged livers, lacerated tracheas and esophagi, pneumonia, throats and gullets severely impacted with undigested corn, massive internal bacterial and fungal growth and sore feet from bumblefoot - all consequences of the production method for which veterinary care is not profitable. A December 2005 necropsy report states: "the stresses of the final forced-feeding caused an acute respiratory limitation on ducks already suffering from pneumonia and severe hepatameglia restricted respiratory activity due to liver pressure on air sacs. This killed the ducks."

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