Well Done, Amazon UK, for Dropping Foie Gras!

Ducks, geese and compassionate Brits are cheering with delight today at the news that online retail giant Amazon has just agreed to stop selling foie gras on its UK website!

The welcome move to remove more than 100 foie gras products from the grocery section of the website comes after 10,000 concerned people wrote to the company asking it to stop profiting from cruelty as part of a campaign spearheaded by the animal rights group Viva!.

Viva! also presented the company with video footage from an investigation in France that showed ducks being force-fed huge amounts of grain with pneumatic pumps on farms connected to Amazon’s suppliers. Congratulations to everyone at Viva! who worked so hard for this victory.

PETA also got behind the campaign, sending a letter to Amazon UK’s managing director, Christopher North. “We hope that you will follow the lead of other ethical retailers and cease selling this cruel product on the Amazon UK website”, we wrote – and we’re over the moon that the company has finally done the right thing!

Of course, it makes sense that Amazon would make this decision. Foie gras is a cruel and revolting foodstuff, produced by force-feeding ducks and geese until they become mortally ill. It’s so inhumane that it’s actually illegal to produce in the UK, and the vast majority of British people would never touch the abhorrent stuff.

With this enlightened move, Amazon UK is joining many other retailers who have banished foie gras from their storerooms, including Selfridges, Ocado and Harvey Nichols. Department store Fortnum & Mason would do well to take note of Amazon’s decision. The company has refused to stop selling foie gras, despite irrefutable video evidence of barbaric cruelty on its supplier’s farms and hundreds of messages from celebrities and former customers asking it to do so.

Now is an excellent time to remind Fortnum & Mason’s CEO Ewan Venters that selling foie gras is unethical and to urge him to have Fortnum & Mason follow Amazon’s lead. Please send him a message here: