MFA Protests Amazon CEO and Shareholders Over Sale of Liver From Tortured Ducks

Today, Mercy For Animals supporters converged in front of Amazon’s annual shareholders meeting in Seattle, Washington, to protest the decision of CEO Jeff Bezos to continue selling cruel foie gras—the diseased, fatty liver of force-fed ducks—on the company’s website.


Wielding signs and banners bearing heartbreaking images of ducks with pipes rammed down their throats and the messages “Jeff Bezos: Please Protect Animals. Ban Foie Gras and “Amazon Supports Animal Torture, activists urged Amazon—the world’s largest online retailer—to immediately end the sale of foie gras on its website. Inside the meeting, Bezos was grilled about the company’s stubborn stance on this issue during the question and answer session.


The company has been “reviewing the matter for three years, ever since an MFA undercover investigation revealed egregious cruelty at an Amazon foie gras supplier: workers violently grabbing ducks by their delicate wings and necks and shoving metal pipes down their throats to force-feed the birds, ducks hyperventilating from their unnaturally large livers pressing against their lungs, and workers hastily shackling ducks upside down and slitting their throats while the birds were still fully conscious and able to feel pain.


Forcing a metal pipe down a duck’s throat and cramming food into his stomach in order to produce a diseased, fatty liver is so patently cruel the practice has been banned in more than a dozen countries, and leading chefs and grocers, including Wolfgang Puck, Whole Foods Market, Costco, Safeway, Giant Eagle, and Target, rightly refuse to sell it.


Amazon has the power and responsibility to ensure that products sold on its website are not the result of blatant animal abuse. The company has already banned the sale of foie gras on its U.K. website and has banned other inherently cruel products on its U.S. website, including shark fins, whale meat, bear bile, ivory, snake and crocodile skin, seal fur, and any part of a dog or cat. It’s time Amazon banned the sale of foie gras too.


Compassionate consumers can help end the torture of ducks for foie gras by signing and sharing our petition at AmazonCruelty.com.