Former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson set feathers flying in the French parliament on Tuesday when she turned up to support a ban on force-feeding ducks and geese to make foie gras.
Former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson set feathers flying in the French parliament on Tuesday when she turned up to support a ban on force-feeding ducks and geese to make foie gras.
The 48-year-old one-time Playboy model was invited to parliament by a member of the green EELV party, which wants to introduce a draft law to ban the practice. Anderson appealed to legislators to abolish force-feeding, saying that “foie gras is not a healthy product and does not have a place in a civilised society. These ducks did not have a single day of happiness in their short lives.”
The appearance of the Canadian-born actress, now an animal rights activist, caused a rare commotion in the assembly as ushers had to call police to control photographers and cameramen crowding the entrance to the small room hosting her press conference.
However, to many legislators and foie gras producers, Anderson’s presence was a political stunt that has not gone down well.
“Pamela Anderson’s visit gets on my nerves and I am fed up with it,” said a spokesman for the ruling Socialists Hugues Fourage, in an apparently deliberate pun. The Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions movement slammed the ecologist deputy who invited her, Laurence Abeille, saying she “preferred turkeys stuffed with silicon to good geese stuffed with maize from (the regions) Landes and Perigord.”
Abeille hit back at “particularly shocking, sexist, chauvinist, misogynistic comments.”
