Some chefs in California are reporting receiving death threats for serving foie gras after a ban on the delicacy was overturned last week.

Chefs cheered the return of the fatty liver of goose or duck, but the move angered animal rights groups.

The activists say the practice of fattening and force-feeding the geese and ducks for foie gras is cruel and amounts to torture.

One chef in Hermosa Beach told NPR that he had received death threats.

"Apparently there's some people out there, that really, they just, they'll kill me," Sean Chaney, of Hot's Kitchen, told the radio.

"But I can't kill an animal that's raised for this?"

His attorney Michael Tenenbaum was quoted as saying that some "take to the Internet and issue death threats, as we saw today, with somebody threatening to find him, kill him, shove a tube in him. This is craziness."

Mr Chaney and foie gras farmers in Canada and New York had challenged the ban, suing the state of California. Hot's Kitchen saw protests when the ban was overturned on 8 January.

Another chef told the Huffington Post that some have threatened to shove a pipe down his throat.

"But it's the ones who would like to see me hung by my feet and bled to death with no anaesthetic - those are the most disturbing," Ken Frank, who own a restaurant in Napa Valley, told the publication.

Animal rights activists last week displayed photos of bloated ducks and geese with pipes shoved down their throats, and called the ruling misguided, a miscarriage of justice and absurd.