The Force-Fed Bird

 The gifts of the 2026 midterm elections just keep coming. Sure, it was great to win senate seats in Texas, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina—and maybe even Mississippi and Alaska, if current leads in the vote count hold. But even the lesser-known ballot measures turn out to be full of positive surprises. 

True, to win Mississippi, Democrats may have had to go all-in on being the pro-beef party. But there was some consolation for the vegetarian (or pescatarian) voter in Washington, D.C.—namely, in the fact that the district finally banned foie gras—a traditional delicacy made through the forced-feeding of birds. 

A New York Times article on the subject introduces the duck Olivia, who helped to capture voters' hearts in favor of the ban on the campaign trail. Apparently, meeting one of these animals and putting a name to her made it harder for D.C. voters to imagine wanting to torture her in order to consume her liver. 

As Thomas Hardy wrote of the "Blinded Bird"—in his great poem of protest against animal cruelty: "Who hath charity? This bird." He could well have been writing of Olivia. 

On the other side of the question, people could apparently do little better than point out: "but foie gras tastes good" (questionable); "we've always done it this way" (a lousy argument for animal torture); and "today it's foie gras, tomorrow it's all meat!" (i.e., the slippery slope fallacy). 

I think none of these arguments may seriously detain us. None is likely to survive any lengthy reflection on the process of how foie gras is actually made—the small cages in which the birds spend their lives; the force-feeding tubes; the lifetime of endless torture in order to engorge the animals' livers. 

... all this indignity,

With God's consent, on thee! [...]

Eternal dark thy lot,

Groping thy whole life long; [...]

Enjailed in pitiless wire, as Hardy described the plight of the blinded bird. 

As Arthur Schopenhauer writes in his On the Basis of Morality, the belief that animals exist only for our use and pleasure and consumption is one of the great moral failings of Western civilization. It is also, in his view, one of the defects of Kantian morality. 

Because Kant saw morality as grounded in reason, in Schopenhauer's telling, he could conceive of few reciprocal obligations that could exist between humans and the brute creation. At best, he advised refraining from overt cruelty to animals as a form of self-training in moral discipline, which would subsequently prove useful in dealing with humans. 

Schopenhauer is appalled. "Thus only for practice are we to have sympathy for animals," he paraphrases Kant's argument; "In common with the whole of Asia [...] I regard such propositions as revolting and abominable."

He adds: "Thus, because Christian morality leaves animals out of account [...] they are at once outlawed in philosophical morals; they are mere 'things,' mere means to any ends whatsoever. They can be used for vivisection, hunting, coursing..."

In case his attitude to this religious and philosophical inheritance in the West were not already obvious, Schopenhauer concludes: "Shame on such a morality [...] that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing." (Payne trans.)

Since morality, for Schopenhauer, is based not on the capacity to reason, but on the capacity to feel sympathy and compassion—what he calls lovingkindness—then it is not difficult at all to see why animals should be included in the moral scheme. 

Schopenhauer points out that despite all the distancing mechanisms of our speech—the way we try to come up with different names for animal body parts, e.g.—everyone can see the obvious ways in which they resemble us, and we resemble them. (Another example may be found in the Times yesterday as well, in the story of a rescued walrus calf.)

In fairness to the Western canon—however little warrant for animal welfare or animal rights there may have been in premodern Christian theology, it did not take the poets forever to see the ways in which humans and animals share a living essence.

Blake, in his "Auguries of Innocence," was already writing that A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all Heaven in a rage, and that A dog starv'd at his master's gate / Predicts the ruin of the state.

The young Coleridge, too, in an immortal poem, wrote of the donkey, that long-mocked and unjustly-insulted member of the animal creation: 

I hail thee Brother - spite of the fool's scorn!

And fain would take thee with me, in the Dell

Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell[.]

May it be so!