2023-08-15 15:52:50
A return that makes you cringe. After a three-year hiatus, the Arfeuilles festival committee is once again organizing its patronal feast this August 15 with the return of its flagship event: the neck of the goose, as indicated The mountain.
This is a “game of skill” organized in the village on the occasion of this festival. “On a galloping horse, a rider must, using a saber, cut the neck of a dead goose hanging from a rope several meters high”, specifies the local media.
An ancestral tradition whose origins date back to the French Revolution. But at a time when animal welfare is increasingly omnipresent in political debate, this practice is controversial. The One Voice association, which campaigns in particular for animal rights, denounces a “French version piñata” and a “barbaric tradition”.
“The goal is just to revive the goose neck tradition to liven up the village.”
Slaughtered then annihilated after death: the French version of the piñata is to kill a goose for the occasion before playing at chopping off its head.
The barbaric traditions haunting our country are legion. https://t.co/wlTqrwmA2X— One Voice (@onevoiceanimal) August 14, 2023
Same story from Sandra Krief, deputy mayor and delegate for Animal Condition City of Grenoble, who denounces a “morbid spectacle which advocates violence”. In 2015, it was the Brigitte Bardot association which announced that it wanted to “twist the neck” of this practice.
But what?! A goose that serves as a piñata, slaughtered and beaten then the neck sliced in front of a family audience!
Seriously! How can a municipality authorize such a morbid spectacle which advocates violence against the living!
City of Arfeuilles, and its mayor, Michel Guicherd!!! https://t.co/M2iGEi4Mlg
— Sandra Krief ???????? (@SandraKrief) August 14, 2023
This “game” has been disturbing for several years while continuing to run smoothly. If the neck of the goose is a tradition “to enliven the village”, in the words of the president of the festival committee Benjamin Rosnet, many of them do not see this practice with the same eye.
“This is not animal disease for fun”
In 2014, the neck of the goose had been the subject of a petition called “The shame of Arfeuilles” and had collected 42,000 signatures, recalls the journalist La Montagne Malik Kebour. The latter specifies on his account X that “the tradition of the neck of the goose brings back thousands of spectators and sustains a village of 650 inhabitants. »
For four years, Arfeuilles has been deprived of its party. The goose neck tradition brings back thousands of spectators and sustains a village of 650 inhabitants. Geese do not melt weight.
– Malik Kebour (@Malik_Kebour) August 14, 2023
Interviewed by Vice in 2018, Jacques Terracol, the mayor of Arfeuilles at the time, admitted receiving “incendiary letters” in town hall. If he admitted that it can be considered “barbaric when you hold your head at the end of your sword in front of children”, he insists on recalling the conditions of this practice.
“One point that is important I think is that these geese are eaten. They were killed the same morning and will be eaten tomorrow or the day after. (…) It is not an animal malaise for fun, they are consumed”, specified the city councilor.
This year, Michel Guicherd, the mayor of this village in the Allier, assures La Montagne that he has not received any contraindication concerning the organization of this practice: “We have not been approached by people opposing on the neck of the goose”.
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