It turns out that the farm is happy to provide tours of their facility, and we made an appointment. Our tour guide, a nice man named Erwin, told us that large quantities of baby ducks - I believe they are a mix of Pekin and Muscovy ducks - are brought in on a regular basis from Canada, and he took us to a huge room filled with hundreds (thousands?) of the little guys. By the way, boys produce better foie gras than girls, so these are all male ducklings. Here are some of them at the water dispenser
Then we went to a different room containing ducklings a bit older - these were five or six weeks old. You can see feeders for them on the left, and the water supply on the right.
These big rooms looked clean and well maintained. The ducklings seemed comfortable and not stressed, although I don't know how one could judge that with confidence.
Finally we entered the room where the force-feeding (gavage) is done. At this point the ducks, larger now, had been segregated into pens containing about ten birds each. The bird feeding technicians - mostly of Mexican extraction - are specialists in what they do, and are well paid and given trailers in which to live, right on the property. Each of these men has an assigned group of birds to feed and is given bonuses whose values depend on the quality of the foie gras harvested from his ducks.
The process consists of restraining each duck, holding its neck vertically, inserting a tube down its throat and discharging feed down the tube. The tube is in place for only about four seconds and the feed is squirted in for about half of that time. The birds don't seem to enjoy the process, necessarily, but since they don't have a gag reflex and the esophagus is tough enough to handle whatever they ingest normally (without chewing), it may be more panic at being held than discomfort. This process is repeated three times a day for eighteen days, which results in livers much larger than normal.
Overall our impression was that the birds are handled as humanely as possible. Certainly their lives are more pleasant than those of chickens who spend their entire lives in cages. But the images of force-feeding have led animal-rights advocates to focus on foie gras production, and Erwin said that the company's legal fees may run into the millions. Many years ago activists broke into the buildings at night and damaged equipment and stole flocks of ducks. Seems to me that there's no intentional cruelty at this facility, and there are much more egregious violations elsewhere in the world of meat production. Of course for some the consumption of any meat is immoral, and while I respect that point of view, most of us don't feel that way.
Driving on the side road to our next campground, we passed a bunch of young men and women dressed in the characteristic style of Hasidic Judaism - dark pants, white shirts, yarmulka or brimmed hats, and sidelocks/pigtails for the guys, long dresses and hair coverings for the ladies, long black coats for older boys and men. We learned that the Catskill Mountains is a popular area for Hasidic summer camps.
We drove to the nearest grocery store, and it was in a town dominated by Orthodox Jewish stores. More signs in Hebrew than English. The grocery was a fascinating one, with breads and pastries that looked delicious but were not what we're used to seeing in secular stores, and lots of kosher products. Israeli music filled the air. Very exotic.
In the grocery parking lot was a nice little park.
When we drove through Canada a few weeks ago, it was almost like being in a couple of unofficial American states. But this Catskills town felt like a foreign country.
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