Nothing like a tough gizzard to make having a metal pipe shoved down your neck feel like a Swedish massage! And then the force-feeding followed by slaughter! I don't know which is more fun, eating the foie gras or being the duck that gives it up! In my experience, both sides in this debate have an unfortunate bent for ludicrous oversimplification. I eat foie gras, I have friends who won't. We all agree, however, even at the top of the food chain, there is merit in avoiding needless cruelty. Whether foie gras production falls into that category is a legitimate question. Building up straw men and knocking them down ("The beautiful irony here is that anti-foie advocates' anthropomorphizing of geese is actually one of the most grossly human-centric things they could do") or falling back onto glib observations ("Food chain. Top. The end.") brings very much illumination to the discussion. ← Acutally, no straw man there. Anthropomorphizing geese is - by definition - a human-centric thing to do. Your (glib) observation is that the feeding process used for foie gras must be painful. Why? Because it seems like it would be so - would you like it if it were you? But - again - you're not a goose. Neither am I. Geese aren't people. Do you know that it's painful for geese other than a glib human-centric assumption that it must be so? Without that, I don't think you have a leg to stand on that this is cruel. The strawman that "if you eat foie and support its production you must like kicking cats and torturing dogs" only works if the production of foie is as painful a process as being a kicked cat or tortured dogs. Do you care to provide any evidence of that based on anything other than applying human feelings to geese? I'm not saying no evidence exists, I'm just not aware of any. ← Precisely my point. As an example, while it would undoubtedly be considered cruel to force a human to stand barefoot on a chunk of ice, in freezing temperatures, all day long, there is a flock of geese across the street who have, quite contentedly, been doing exactly that all day long with no apparent ill effects. Human and animal physiology differs so greatly that I cannot consider foie gras production methods to be cruel or inhumane without more evidence than an apparent lack of resemblance to a “swedish massage”.