Geece

The down industry is a barbaric trade and the birds enslaved there suffer terribly as they are kept in cramped conditions and often plucked when alive and fully conscious.

To gather the geese for transport, they are grouped together in very small enclosures where they panic and step on them. The geese at the bottom of the pile were run over and some died of suffocation. Sick and injured chicks, geese and ducks are left to slowly agonize. Dead birds rot in enclosures or ponds or piled up outdoors like garbage.

Once the geese are confined to the pens, the workers grab them by the neck, dragging them to the transport crates, while they cry out in distress and flap their wings. Some geese are sometimes trampled several times by employees. Then, they are piled up in boxes with such violence that one hears the cages bumping into each other.

Being confined in these small cages for an extended period of time can cause painful, muscle cramps, unnecessary stress and predispose anxious birds to injury. After an exhausting journey, which is often done in freezing temperatures, of more than five to six hours on the highway to the slaughterhouse, the geese are left in the crates covered with droppings sometimes for 24 hours, without water or food.

Once unloaded for slaughter, the geese attend, just as terrified as the other birds who are seized by the neck, stunned, suspended by chains upside down and killed in front of their eyes by the employees who slaughter them. Then comes their turn.

Birds flap their wings and move their heads as they bleed. They clearly show signs of state of consciousness and sensitivity, meaning the birds are awake while being strangled and suffocated or they are dying from hemorrhage or trauma under extremely painful conditions and causing a lot of anxiety.

Much of the world's down comes from China, where there is no animal welfare law. In addition to the fur of coyotes caught in steel jaw traps before being shot or struck to death, the Canada Goose brand fills them, too, with down jackets from these abused birds. Canada Goose is deceiving the public by claiming that the birds they use for down experience no fear, pain, distress or physical discomfort. Half of the birds from the Canada Goose supplier have wing bruises, and even broken bones and dislocated joints, upon killing them. This is due to the brutal way of putting them in the cages.

As with any other animal products industry, birds bred for their feathers are brutally slaughtered.