Pamela Anderson has transitioned her career from Baywatch babe to animal rights activist.  She was in Paris yesterday campaigning for the passing of a bill that would outlaw the production of foie gras in this country.

Incidentally, the above photo is not Pamela; it’s Brigitte Bardot.  But more on that in a minute.  (They look very much alike.)

Foie gras.  Foie means liver and gras means fat or greasy.  But in reality it should be called fois élargi (enlarged liver) because when a duck or goose is force-fed by way of shoving a long tube down its throat then pouring in boiling hot corn feed, the liver eventually becomes enlarged to 10 times its normal size.  This barbaric force-feeding technique is called gavage.  Ducks are force-fed twice a day for 12 days and geese three times a day for 17 days.  Then after 100 days they are slaughtered, the swollen liver taken out and prepared so that humans can pay a lot of money, sit around a table, drink champagne and spread slices of the liver onto little toasts and eat it.  I know.  It’s disgusting and I actually did that a month ago.  The eating of foie gras is big over the Christmas holidays here.  I won’t touch it anymore.

So France being France, Pamela’s arrival and subsequent speech in front of the National Assembly provoked the following cartoon, images and comments.  The American TV series, Baywatch, was rebroadcast in France throughout the 1990s and re-titled to Alerte à Malibu.  Here, the cartoonist has written Alerte à Périgueux.  Périgueux is the capital of the Dordogne department in south-west France, the largest foie gras-producing region in the country.

A major newspaper published this photo of Baywatch Pamela and imbedded it into a photo of the National Assembly where she spoke.

A politician said “It’s a publicity stunt. The current problems of France are terrorism, high unemployment, immigration and the economy…not geese and ducks.  If you shut down the foie gras industry, then thousands of farmers will be out of work.”

It’s clear where French priorities lie.  Last year France produced 72% of the world’s foie gras production.  Hungary is the world’s second-largest foie gras producer.

Ms. Anderson seems to have been inspired by Brigitte Bardot who, in 1986, established the B.B. Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. 

Good for Pamela Anderson.  I support her endeavor 100 per cent.

“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”   Mahatma Gandhi