Geece

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

1. CAPTURE AND TRANSPORT CONDITIONS

To gather geese for transport, they are crammed into tiny enclosures where they panic and trample one another. Geese at the bottom of the pile are crushed, and some die of suffocation. Sick or injured chicks, geese, and ducks are left to agonize. Dead birds rot in the pens or ponds, or are piled outside like garbage.

Once the geese are confined, workers grab them by the neck, dragging them toward transport crates while they scream in distress and flap their wings. Some geese are occasionally trampled multiple times by employees. Afterward, they are stacked into boxes with such violence that the cages can be heard crashing against each other.

Being locked in these small cages for a prolonged period can cause painful muscle cramps, unnecessary stress, and predispose anxious birds to injury. Following an exhausting highway journey of over five to six hours to the slaughterhouse, often in freezing temperatures, the geese are left inside crates covered in feces, sometimes for 24 hours, without food or water.

2. SLAUGHTER AND AGONY AT THE ABATTOIR

Once unloaded for slaughter, the geese witness, just as terrified as the other birds, their companions being grabbed by the neck, stunned, hung upside down by chains, and killed right before their eyes by the employees. Then it is their turn.

The birds flap their wings and move their heads while bleeding out. They clearly display signs of consciousness and sentience, meaning the birds are awake while being choked and suffocated, or while dying from hemorrhaging or trauma under extremely painful and anxiety-inducing conditions.

3. GLOBAL ORIGINS AND COMMERCIAL PRACTICES

A large portion of the world's down originates from China, where there are no animal welfare laws. In addition to fur from coyotes caught in steel-jaw traps before being shot or beaten to death, the Canada Goose brand also fills its jackets with the down of these mistreated birds. Canada Goose deceives the public by claiming that the birds used feel no fear, pain, distress, or physical discomfort. Half of the birds from Canada Goose's supplier exhibit bruised wings, and even broken bones or dislocated joints at the time of slaughter. This is due to the brutal method of forcing them into cages.

Like any other animal product industry, birds raised for their feathers are brutally slaughtered.