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Joe Rogan says factory farming should be ‘f*cking’ illegal.
The comedian, and host of the world’s most popular podcast, made the comments in a recent episode featuring Dr. Paul Saladino.
Physician Dr. Saladino is a major proponent of the carnivore diet. Definitions of the diet vary from eating mostly to entirely raw or cooked meat. Joe Rogan himself tried the diet earlier this year.
Liver
During the episode, the pair discussed liver, with Dr. Saladino saying it contains a number of nutrients.
This led the pair to discuss foie gras – which is controversial because of the inhumane ways ducks and geese are force-fed to engorge their livers.
While Rogan argued the product is ‘so good’, Dr. Saladino said it is essentially ‘diseased liver’ because of the way it is produced.
Force-feeding
Joe Rogan described the process saying ‘go to the feeding pipe and want it to happen’.
This position is at odds with a huge body of investigative footage showing how foie gras workers physically insert the feeding pipe into the throats of the animals.
“I’m not in favor of doing weird sh*t to animals,” Rogan, an enthusiastic hunter, said. “I’m not in favor of giving them food they’re not supposed to eat, not in favor of overfeeding or force-feeding them. But I just find it odd that they go to this pipe.”
‘Gross’
When Rogan asked a producer to find footage of foie gras production, it showed the animals being force-fed, which he described as ‘different to the video [he] saw’. After looking at several videos, all showed the animals being physically force-fed.
“It’s weird, they’re grabbing the duck, they’re not going to be into that no matter what you do,” conceded Rogan. “It just seems gross.”
Foie gras in California
Because of its innate cruelty, foie gras is illegal in California – leading Rogan to muse on factory farming, asking: “Is it any grosser than things that are legal?”
He said a ‘lot of stuff is legal that we do to animals – when do we decide what’s legal and what’s not legal?’.
“Because factory farming should be completely f*cking illegal, and it’s legal in California,” he said. “You can get factory-fed animals and you can buy them left and right but you can’t get foie gras anymore.”
This, he argued, doesn’t make any sense, as ‘one small moment of this duck’s day when they are shoving a tube in his life and feeding him’ is awful.
“The life of a pig you eat for bacon is terrible. Torture. And you’re ok with that, you’re just not okay with this duck getting extra grain pumped down its mouth and living a normal life apart from that.”
