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Saturday 22 November 2008

You’d think Prince Charles would approve of foie gras

Alexander Chancellor says that it is the sort of food which the Prince should like: free of chemicals and genetic manipulation, produced on small family farms, and steeped in tradition

It is, however, curious that it should concern them so much more than other forms of animal ill-treatment that are crueller and carried out on a far larger scale. The producers of foie gras will tell you that their ducks and geese are contented, that they queue up eagerly to be force-fed and that, because their throats are flexible and have no gag reflex, they suffer no pain.

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Even so, none of the scientific or medical studies carried out so far has found much evidence of distress among the birds that have been force-fed — certainly nothing compared to the distress suffered by, say, battery chickens.

And even if the force-feeding of geese is cruel, it is not at least gratuitously cruel. It is carried out with reluctance as the only sure way to produce one of the world’s greatest gastronomic delights.

Compare it, for example, with hunting with hounds or pheasant-shooting, two sports in which Prince Charles in his time has enthusiastically indulged. You can’t eat a fox, and while pheasants are, of course, edible, that’s not why people shoot them: it is for the fun of the kill. Of the 15 million pheasants bred for shooting last year, only a small proportion will have been eaten, and many will have died slowly after being wounded. The same sort of thing applies to fishing.

According to scientific studies, fish are just as capable of feeling pain as any hot-blooded creature, for their mouths are full of nerve ends. Yet fish, although also edible, are hooked only for the fun of it, and in most cases are returned alive to the water with mutilated mouths.

But it’s foie gras that generates all the passion. When once, in another magazine, I congratulated Mohammed Al Fayed for refusing to bow to pressure and stop selling foie gras at Harrods, I received the biggest haul of hate mail of my life. ‘Personally, I would disembowel Mr Chancellor and make him eat his own liver,’ wrote one typical correspondent.

People who object in principle to the killing or hurting of any creature for either food or sport deserve respect. But to pick on the force-feeding of geese as the greatest of man’s crimes against the animal kingdom is irrational and absurd.

Foie gras is an easy target, because it is enjoyed by a tiny minority and smacks of privilege and self-indulgence. No wonder the animal rights militants have chosen it as their casus belli. But I’m a little disappointed in Prince Charles.

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