If livestock are genetically engineered so they feel less pain, is it a kindness that makes the best of an inevitable, bad situation? Yes, says Adam Shriver in his NYTimes op/ed piece, Not Grass-Fed, but at Least Pain-Free
Or is it a revolting palliative that allows us to sooth our collective consciousness while continuing and perhaps even worsening the conditions of animals we raise for food? After all, they can't feel pain so why avoid it?
Read more below the fold, then take the poll.
Shriver writes:
We are most likely stuck with factory farms, given that they produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume. But it is still possible to reduce the animals’ discomfort — through neuroscience. Recent advances suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less.
How do to do this? Genetically engineer animals so they are missing proteins that allow them to experience pain as unpleasant. Animals will still feel pain's location, quality, and intensity. But they will be like morphine addicts from birth to death: pain is there but they don't care. Technically, it's doing this genetically instead of by damaging a live animal:
Neuroscientists have found that by damaging a laboratory rat’s anterior cingulate cortex, or by injecting the rat with morphine, they can likewise block its affective perception of pain. The rat reacts to a heated cage floor by withdrawing its paws, but it doesn’t bother avoiding the places in its cage where it has learned the floor is likely to be heated up.
We could breed "knockout animals" — pigs and cows who:
would still be able to recognize and avoid, when possible, situations where they might be bruised or otherwise injured.
It's that "when possible" that gives it away. Even in this op/ed piece, Shriver talks about the "painful bone and joint problems" of veal calves and gestating cows as well as the "severe gastric distress" of animals fed an unnatural grain diet on feedlots. If you've seen Food, Inc. or read anything about factory-farming practices, you know that this is just the tip of a very nasty iceberg.
A staple theme in science fiction is the creation of a class of people who don't feel or mind what happens to them. These beings are used for combat, pleasure, or food. Nearly always, the stories show that abuse grows as the handlers or clients no longer have to worry about hurting the meatbots. If cows and pigs don't mind pain, why not make the veal pens even smaller? Does this make Bovine Growth Hormone OK, since the cows won't care about the damage to their udders?
Factory farming as we currently practice it is immoral. The quick and easy solution is for people to eat less animal-based foods. If you eat mostly less-expensive, plant-based foods, then you can use the savings to demand decent conditions for any animals who do produce your food. (Before you post a "poor people can't afford decent food" comment, please take a look at Cook for Good, where I show how to do this on a food-stamp budget even in the dead of winter.)
And yet ... I also feel sick thinking about refusing genetic morphine for animals who will be raised in horrific conditions. What do you think?