Thursday, July 19, 2007

GUILTY BEFORE BEING PROVEN GUILTY

Farm Sanctuary is going after Amazon.com, calling for a boycott of the popular "we have everything" website for selling Foie Gras from the Elevages Perigord farm in Quebec, Canada. Good luck with that, Jeff Bezos probably loses more money in the laundry each day than a Farm Sanctuary boycott could possibly take away from him.


This all started a few days ago when the group released a video they claim was shot undercover at the farm, one of North America's largest, depicting what they allege is an employee treating the birds under his care in quite a harsh manner. The video is admittedly disturbing, and the company has since suspended at least one worker while investigators from the Canadian government look into the matter. What's unclear is how much of the video was actually shot at the farm, and how much of it that is presented out of context. The narrator makes many "observations" outside of the realm of what's seen on the tape. Farm Sanctuary isn't exactly an unbiased news outlet and has been accused of misrepresenting "evidence" in the past.

While FoieBlog too is decidedly biased, we have no love for those who would go out of their way to torture animals of any sort. However, we wish Farm Sanctuary would take a breath and give the proper authorities the opportunity to investigate the situation before they get ahead of themselves calling for across the board boycotts. FoieBlog preliminarily applauds Elevages Perigord for taking swift action in this matter and fully cooperating with authorities. We trust this will turn out to be nothing more than one bad egg in an otherwise respectable operation, but will wait for the outcome to the investigation before passing final judgement. Too bad Farm Sanctuary won't do the same.


As usual, the danger here is that Jeff Bezos only hears the story from one side and decides to cut off Elevages Perigord or other Foie Gras products as a public relations stunt. Vote with your wallet, folks, and if you don't feel comfortable buying Elevages Periord products until more is known about the situation, never fear, Amazon also markets products from always above suspicion outfits like Hudson Valley Foie Gras and D'Artagnan.

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