Bill Oddie Left Twitching Over Fortnum & Mason’s Cormorant Cock-Up
Read Bill Oddie’s letter to Beverley Aspinall in full here.
Beloved twitcher Bill Oddie has an ornithology lesson for Fortnum & Mason Managing Director Beverley Aspinall, (or Beverley ‘KnowsBuggerAll’ amirite?) who, in a meeting with PETA earlier this year, attempted to justify F&M’s continued sale of foie gras by equating its production – in which ducks and geese are force-fed via a feeding pipe rammed down their throats several times a day until their livers become diseased and enlarged – with cormorants who swallow whole fish in the wild! In a letter sent today to the F&M head, Oddie is quick to refute this ludicrous notion – and to condemn F&M for “condoning a shameful act of cruelty”.
“There is no wild bird whose natural feeding method could be remotely equated with the insertion of metal tubing, which may pierce the bird’s throat, causing pain, fear and aberrant physical reactions”, writes Oddie. “Foie gras production … is unethical and uncivilised, and should be an embarrassment to those who are involved.” The production of foie gras is banned in the UK and more than a dozen other countries because it is so cruel – but it is still legal to sell foie gras here. F&M is shamefully paying farms in France to cruelly force-feed geese so that they can then import the product into the UK bearing their label.
Oddie joins a long list of prominent figures – including Sir Roger Moore, Ricky Gervais, the Duchess of Hamilton, Twiggy, Jenny Seagrove, Carley Stenson, Peter Egan and Owain Yeoman – who have appealed to F&M to pull the cruel product from its shelves. Both Selfridges and Harvey Nichols now refuse to sell or serve foie gras after learning from PETA about the cruelty that is involved in its production.
