Knockout Meat

[KC Masterpiece]

Article from the New York Times:

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.

If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether, the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on them. It would be far better than doing nothing at all.

and two responses, here and here:

First, let’s just look at what Shriver and those in his camp are advocating — that we damage animals’ brains, so that we can damage the rest of their bodies with less guilt, so that we can continue treating them like inanimate objects rather than, oh, I don’t know, rethink what despicable things we’re doing in the first place. The idea that the solution to treating them as objects is to treat them even more like objects (and experiment on who-knows-how-many animals to achieve this non-solution) boggles the mind.

Knock out animals might suffer less, but might all around be more zombie-like. They are closer to being what Ruth Harrison calls “meat machines.” Is that progress, or just another step in an already terrible direction?

[helmut]

very disturbing. they are in essence saying 'this suffering of animals is wrong', and so instead of taking it to its logical conclusion (let's not eat animals) they're fucking with animals brains?

truly sick....

[EceGled]

Reminds of the guy who would bring men to his home for sex, tie them down, and then attempt to cut out their forebrains because he heard that's where the emotions lie... he basically wanted to create emotionless sex drones who would obey his every command. Well, needless to say, he ended up murdering all the ones he succeeded to cut open and didn't get much sex!

Anyway, breeding is itself cruel, so this suggestion is completely absurd.

[flightlessbirds]

It always makes my blood boil a little when I hear people say things like "there were always be factory farms," like its a given and therefor we should lie down and abandon all hope of change.

Ugh, this whole concept is just sick.

[Linnéa76]

There aren't enough facepalms in the world to express how I feel about this...

[Gelert]

Reminds of the guy who would bring men to his home for sex, tie them down, and then attempt to cut out their forebrains because he heard that's where the emotions lie... he basically wanted to create emotionless sex drones who would obey his every command. Well, needless to say, he ended up murdering all the ones he succeeded to cut open and didn't get much sex!

I think I saw that X Files episode!

very disturbing. they are in essence saying 'this suffering of animals is wrong', and so instead of taking it to its logical conclusion (let's not eat animals) they're fucking with animals brains?

Indeed - this is common to almost every area of research in this field: X is bad about ****, rather than stop ****, let's figure out how to stop X and maximize our production of ****.

Speaking of logical conclusions: The logical conclusion of this approach though is to do exactly the same thing to humans. I'm sure a half decent science friction writer could envisage society in 40-50 years time where large multinationals have employees genetically modified not to give a fuck and work in absurd conditions. It would be the convergence of both genetic technology in this direction and the memetic engineering that's already commonplace within the so called world of work.

You could either breed your Worker drones 2.0 using germline modification or just infect them with a neurotropic viral vector upon signing their contract. Thinking about it in those terms practically, given a supportive climate and research funds, forget 40-50 years, the latter kind of modification could be coming out of labs in China in 4-5 years.

Future's a scary place, but on the flipside, I suppose if you had this done you wouldn't be scared by it.

[Asleep on a sunbeam]

Edit: I missed gelerts post, now mine is merely an echo of his for the most part .
Still it's probably encouraging that we've come to the same conclusions .

I recently made a thread on a separate forum (which can be found here:
http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthr ... st23986643) Which addresses the inconsistencies with having a meat industry and not including humans. I'm sure most of you will have come across similar views (and I'm not expecting anyone here to click on the thread, merely giving them the option to).

Basically my issue is with the speciesism.
Presumably if I wanted to do something similar to a human I would land in jail. And if that is the case (not that I want this to happen to non human animals or human ones) then it does not by any means subvert the bigoted views against animals which are so deeply embedded in our society.

One outcome of the breeding wouldn't be "should we do this to an animal" once it's happened but instead a description; "we have being x in this position, is using it in the meat industry wrong".
A potential claim could be that the genetic changes are in favour of animal interests on a species wide level, but I doubt that this view could be coherently held as their only reason for being in the meat industry remains to be for human benefit, and not the benefit of the animals on either a species wide level or an individual level.

[ska face]

[quote] I'm sure a half decent science friction writer could envisage society in 40-50 years time where large multinationals have employees genetically modified not to give a fuck and work in absurd conditions[/quote]

They already have - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.