GB No. 3, winter 1990/91
Fattening of geese lasts four weeks. They cannot withstand much more. They are fed 1 kg of wet corn three times a day. Using a metal tube, the food is directly into the stomach. If a goose can't eat any more, its neck is tightened with a rubber rope to prevent vomiting. In the fourth week of agony, the animal can't move, and the liver weighs 2,5 kg. The liver of the goose kept under normal conditions for four years weighs 300 grams. Veterinary examination shows the numb gullet and the damage of the inner organs.
The fattened geese's livers are exported to France, where they are used for the production of the Strasbourg pate. Frenchmen, how do you like it?
The procedure of fattening was first disclosed in Poznań. The Public Persecutor unequivocally admitted, that this artificial way of fattening the liver to the point when the organ presses on the heart and lungs, causing premature death of the animal, is inhuman. More - over, this procedure is against the Act issued by the President of the Polish Republic in 1928 concerning the protection of animals, which forbids torment and against the resolution of the UNESCO Declaration of the Rights of Animals.
After Poznań, the investigation was started in Kalisz and Radzyń Podlaski. The procedure of fattening was acknowledged as illegal everywhere. The persecutor's investigation was also started in Kraków, because such fattening is also conducted in the poultry factory in Niepołomice, the town situated near Kraków. The wife of a man who was keeping the geese for the order of Niepołomice Factory said: "My husband almost vomited after returning from the poultry - house. The man who devised the whole procedure should be given the same doses". It's not a bad idea.
The office of the Public Persecutor in Kraków has sent all the documents to Warsaw. "We request competent ministry to forbid those practices in all the poultry factories around the country" - Persecutor Krystyna Maślanka.
To forbid the practices? But what about the annual income of 5 mln $? "The method is inhuman but it brings the important hard currency" - The head of the Department in Ministry of Agriculture, K. Sobczak.
The poultry factory in Niepołomice officially stopped the production and export of the fattened livers in January 1990. Is that true? The inspector of the Association of the Friends of Animals R. Feldman "is afraid that it is not true". The inspector has also other doubts. The fattening of the geese to obtain the liver is not the only activity of the factory. Mr. Feldman is also talking about the improper method of killing chickens. The transmission belt, where 8 - week chickens are placed, tied by the legs, goes through the stand no 1 - the electric machine used to daze the chicken. This facility should cause the chicken to become quickly unconscious. This state of unconsciousness should endure long enough to allow the chicken to be drained of blood before getting to the stand no 2 - the machine knife. Dazing of the chicken is done with the 1000 V current. The facility can handle 5400 chickens per hour. The inspector has found that the facility was out of order. In one minute, 12 chickens were not dazed. The machine was renovated in 1979 and even then it was inefficient. Mr. Feldman asks: "How many chickens were killed inhumanely since 1979?".
Can we call killing human? Theoretically a dazed chicken is "processed " at the stand no 2: the mechanical knife. But also, the inspector there observed that the worker at the stand was not fulfilling her duties cutting the Chicken's throats. A live chicken - says Mr. Feldman - went through her hands to the bleeding trough, where it fought for its life. After a few minutes it fell dead, near another dead chicken.
The answer of the poultry in Niepołomice for the written intervention of the Association of the Friends of the Animals was: "The factory is concerned about technologic, physiological and in the last place human aspects of the procedure". Well, humanitarianism does not bring hard currency.
We ask everybody to help to disclose the practices of fattening geese for the liver in the poultry factory. Such factories exist in almost every district of the country. In the cases of production of the livers, the res- ponsible persons could be persecuted.
Katarzyna Grzesik
ZB no. 3(9)/90