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Pain-Free Animals Could Take Suffering Out of Farming
Philosopher Adam Shriver suggested that genetically engineering cows to feel no pain could be an acceptable alternative to eliminating factory farming in a paper published in Neuroscience. Work by neuroscientist Zhou-Feng Chen at Washington University may turn Shriver's suggestion a reality. Chen has been working on identifying the genes that control "affective" pain, the unpleasantness part of a painful sensation. He has managed to isolate a gene called P311, and has found that mice who do not have P311 don't have negative associations with pain, although they do react negatively to heat and pressure. This could end much of the concern about cruel farming practices, but unfortunately still leaves my design for the fiery hamburger punch in the unethical column.
Uh oh
I want to be Pain Free too!!!
This is actually a fairly significant thing.
...eliminates the soul-sucking ennui of day-to-day life.
I think they're missing the point.
CAN != Should
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Pain serves a useful biological function: it allows living things to know when they have been injured.
Now, admittedly, cattle are not the brightest animals in the evolutionary tree. Nevertheless, they still know enough to stay away from things that hurt them. Removing the ability to do that can't possibly be good for their safety.
Now I can build my impervious-to-pain super-soldier army! Thank you, cow scientists!
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Udderly Stupid (sorry, couldn't help myself).
An animal that can not feel pain would be very likely to injure itself. People who have conditions where they cannot feel pain are having to constantly check themselves for broken bones, sores, scrapes, etc. You might think it would be wonderful to live in a world without pain, but it would truly be awful.
Pain is there for a reason.... unlike this freaking 1.5" wide text area I am typing in.
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Now this is just sick, and the kind of workaround that would make an IT pro cry.
It might sound like a good idea but I find the whole idea of genetically engineering cows so they don't feel pain so we can eat them without guilt is kind of creepy, surreal, and absurd. The far simpler solution is to eEither stop eating meat or continue eating it the same way we have for as long as there has been humans. I mean what's next? Engineer ourselves to not feel pain? Then is it OK to murder?
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Dish of the Day: Good evening, madame and gentlemen. I am the main dish of the day. May I interest you in parts of my body? May I urge you, sir, to consider my liver? It must be very rich and tender by now. I have been force feeding myself for months.
Universal Soldier or something like it.
Rex Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!
So now that farm animals can feel no pain, we can just push them until they drop dead in the fields?
Barb-wire fence. Electric fence. Cattle Prods. All useless.
They keep hurting themselves. Break elg. burn. Cut. Wanna bet that you would have to change some farming rule to make sure your cow would be halfway in a decent health when slaughtered ?
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The latest and currently most popular sport: cow charging. Almost any motor vehicle will do. Ram it into the cow, and listen to it's hilarious confused mooooooooo,
A pain-free animal would quickly injure itself, and die.
There is a good reason for pain.
Could they fix this in vegetables?
I'm sure all those plant murderers and seventh-level vegans need a clean conscience.
Those sustainable concentration camps for heirloom tomatoes and local gourds are surely filled with suffereing as the plants would prefer to be left alone to raise their families.
So we'll have leather-clad BDSM cows in high heels whipping each others ?
Most of the vegetarians I've asked would eat meat that had been cloned in a vat. It would presumably be much more efficient in terms of energy than raising live animals as well, since all the energy could go into the juicy and delicious parts without wasting it on such incidentals as walking around and mooing.
Making the cow inured to pain? So the majority of people would go from not worrying one jot about how the animal feels, to.... oh. Vegetarians would probably just start to refuse to eat the meat on the grounds that it had been genetically engineered, or because of the psychological pain of being a farm animal.
Call back when you can make me a fillet steak in a vat, for a lower cost than one that used to moo. Until then... farm animals have it one heck of a lot better than equivalent wild animals. I'll keep on eating them, and I'll only feel mildly guilty about their cost in terms of resources (about 10 times the amount that vegetable sources of protein cost).
I've been wondering about this for a while now: Since pigs and dairy cows are basically kept in a pen slightly larger than their bodies, couldn't they be surgically modified to basically be in a vegetative state and then tube-fed? Would that add significantly to the cost of meat? I know that I'd be willing to pay extra for meat from animals who verifiably did not suffer.
Pain serves no useful function anymore. Its chief use is now as something for bullies to threaten with.
What you mean is "a biological monitoring status feature" serves a function. But then on demand, we should be able to turn it off.
Except in action movies, bullies are in better physical shape than their victims. Once they get an advantage, it's like a gaming-control lock.
If pain were made optional, I think interesting things would happen to the legal code. You'd get more heavy duty conflicts.
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Milliways. Where the cows want to be eaten.
Feeling no pain is different from experiencing distress. Its not the pain that most activists are worried about, its the living conditions, the over crowding, the bad feed.
Get a grip.
Gregor
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You would think so, but many activists would disagree. In abortion for example, regulations intended to reduce the number of abortions that come out early have not been pressed by pro-life activists because it would reduce the (relatively small) number of abortions that are so horrific that they can use it to rally supporters.
I think the same would apply here, would people really feel as bad for the animals if they don't feel pain? Would the whole movement just lose steam instead of taking a step forward?
When humans feel no pain (like crackheads) they go crazy and stab things. What happens when cows feel no pain? Do they go on a rampage?
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"It's impossible! These cows... they..?! They DON'T FEEL A THING! They can't be stopped!"
What a terrible idea! Pain sensors exist for a reason - to let even big dumb animals realize when something hurts, so they can attempt to remove themselves from the cause if possible. I don't believe morally that removing the end-result (pain) makes causing their body harm any less inhumane.
More importantly, there are other reasons for removing the factory farm. You are what you eat folks. Animals that feed on grass and walk around becoming strong are inherently HEALTHIER, which means you are too. They require fewer antibiotics, steroids, and anything else you don't want to ingest on a regular basis.
Hey, maybe we should bring back the home lobotomy kits so that people won't be bored anymore 8)-
Why not just 'engineer' them to have no brain at all, just like the guy who suggested this!
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Disclaimer: I'm a vegetarian for ethical / spiritual reasons.
Okay, seriously, whomever thought of this completely missed the entire point: If you are the kind of person who believes that causing animals pain is morally wrong, don't eat them. Giving them some kind of genetic anesthesia doesn't change the underlying issue, which is that harming a conscious being, even one "less conscious" than yourself, should, at the least, give you moral pause.
It is also perfectly valid to decide that eating animals is perfectly acceptable in the real world. In nature, you have no obligation to go hungry. If you believe that, then simply go about the business of eating whatever you want.
The underlying problem isn't whether it is right or wrong to eat meat. It is the kind of person and life you become as a result of your choices. Have the balls, at least, to make a choice. This weird "I don't want to hurt you so I'm just going to make it so you can't feel pain and I don't feel guilt" makes a person spineless at best, and borders on some kind of self-imposed sociopathy at worst.
Just give 'em all leprosy!
Pain-free soldiers could take the suffering out of war...
Pain-free Asian children could take the suffering out of Nike shoes...
I don't want to sound like a douche or anything, but I became vegitarian (not vegan though) a few months ago, and except for a few exceptions for fish, I've stuck to it pretty tight. I'll joke about the Nirvana lyric 'its ok to eat fish because they don't have any feelings', but this is kind of just a step too far. Yeah, I think its somewhat ghoulish to find nourishment in the chard flesh and dead animals, but when you really think about it, vegetarianism does more for us than it does for the animals.
Franly, between soy and hemp we could pretty much eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, the needs for both ranching and logging, taking a lot of pressure off of de-forestation and putting ourselves in a much better position with regards to this 'climate change' thing. And whether that's true or not, or as bad as its been made out to be or not, there is still a lot to be said both practically and morally for stopping deforestation. So, yay soy and hemp.
Making something less painful will always just encourage more of it. Body armour, long-range weapons and all that jazz have made the US a fair bit more willing to go to war than we were even when it made more sense, if you remember all the ass-dragging over entering WWI and WWII, yet the blink-of-an-eye before beating up on Afghanistan or Iraq who were in no position to actually fight back.
Pain serves a very practical purpose -- it's natures way of saying "hey, dumbass, don't do that!" and going around messing with eliminating the pain gene for our own benefit in one species is probably the first step on the road to eliminating it in our own species. This is a bad idea.
Right now you can use things like barbed wire fences and electric fences to keep the cows safe and corralled. If they couldn't feel pain it'd be a cross between a cow and "Darkman". They'd charge through fences getting cut to ribbons and never noticing the blood, or stand on electric fences until they caught fire. Cattle are painfully stupid. Stupid livestock are expensive and annoying to deal with. Ask a turkey farmer.
Instead of farm animals, use PETA members. Vegetarian fed, good health (a bit stringy, though) and, lets face it, who's going to object to them putting their bodies where there mouths are?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Did anyone else also think of the book?
Seems strikingly similar to me.
This could end much of the concern about cruel farming practices, but unfortunately still leaves my design for the fiery hamburger punch in the unethical column.
No, I think it will only raise the concerns. Just because an animal can't feel you pushing it around with a forklift doesn't mean it isn't cruel. Further, pain is a safety of sorts...that an animal can feel pain and react to it is motivation for its owners/caretakers to treat it properly. Granted, there are some sick people who don't care, but thankfully, many people at least feel guilt at the sound and sight of an animal in pain. Why exactly are we taking that away, instead of treating the animals better? Oh yes, right, profit.
Furthermore, while I enjoy a tasty cheeseburger as much as any other omnivore, I have enough vegetarian friends to know that their concerns in the "treatment of animals" department (there are MANY reasons people go vegetarian) extend well beyond immediate pain. It's also the concept of keeping animals in captivity they object to, and they don't really mean the cute farm your kids draw. They mean the megafarms where animals spend their entire lives in a pen the size of your shower.
Please help metamoderate.
Do we really want to encourage the idea that people can inflict injury or pain on animals without shame? Not all animals would be engineered in this way. Some of those will be your pets others will be in the wild. Can people who get used to the guilt free abuse of animals really be expected to turn that behavior off when they are around your pets or children or, for that matter other adults? I doubt it. They will be completely desensitized. Frightening.
BTW I am an omnivore. I just think that cruelty is always wrong and that we shouldn't encourage people to lose their inhibitions against such behavior. By the same reasoning though I concede that some people may "deserve" torture for their crimes, I don't want to turn any of the "good" guys into monsters by letting them inflict torture.
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'That's absolutely horrible,' exclaimed Arthur, 'the most revolting thing I've ever heard.'
'What's the problem Earthman?' said Zaphod, now transfering his attention to the animal's enormous rump.
'I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing there inviting me to,' said Arthur, 'It's heartless.'
'Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten,' said Zaphod.
'That's not the point,' Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. 'Alright,' he said, 'maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ... I
think I'll just have a green salad,' he muttered.
'May I urge you to consider my liver?' asked the animal, 'it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months.'
Don't these idiots know that the suffering is where all the good flavor is?
Wow. Talk about a lack of vision. If you've got a precise identification of a pain gene and a sequence of it, you're on the path to identifying the protein it makes and then finding chemicals that bind to that protein, affecting its function.
Who gives a damn about humanely slaughtering cows? This is the starting point to the perfect medication for patients with debilitating chronic pain. It might also be the starting point to drugged-up super-soldiers and, if you can find drugs that turn *on* the pain protein rather than deactivate it, the perfect torture drug.
It's a mixed bag to be sure, but if your imagination is limited to cows, you're not thinking hard enough.
So, if these cows do not feel pain, would it still be considered inhumane to take actions against them that would normally cause pain?
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It's amazing how many people call the researcher stupid, when they obviously haven't even read the parent. It clearly states that they still react negatively to heat and pressure, so it is NOTHING like the children that are born without feeling.
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because we seem to going overboard in finding new ways to feel guilty about our lifestyle through the ages and even more absurd ways to deal with it.
Suddenly its the pain the animal feels before it dies, sorry, but hello, its the fact we killed it that should cause more guilt than the pain it felt getting to that end result.
If you object to the first but not the latter you need to grow up and accept how you live your life or give up food products requiring the death of a living creature.
Yes I am a meat eater. So while I do think "unnecessary" pain/cruelty should be avoided the whole idea of removing their ability to feel pain just so "I can sleep better" borders on being sick.
Its like having a death penalty that doesn't hurt. I mean, if your going to kill them for their crimes they why care? Their crimes certainly had to be gross enough for you to consider killing them in the first place, why are you suffering more about your decision than they will feel in death?
So, whatever... whats next, feeling remorse for stealing unborn chicks from hens and serving them with a potato you yanked from the ground before mercilessly dicing into itty bitty bits?
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Pain-Free Animals Could Take Suffering Out of Farming
are farmers planning on giving cows medical marijuana now?
Maybe we should take some of Peter Davison's DNA and the DNA of a Painless Cow and you have an animal that wants you to eat it and is offended if you do not eat it.
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My imagination for uses is not limited to cows, but my imagination for testing is limited to cows. I'll wait a while before trying any of that myself.
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Well, it would probably cost too much, since then you'd have to raise it on perfusions and generally artifficial life support. I mean, properly without a brain, it wouldn't even breathe.
It's probably more economical to remove just the pain part, and let the rest of the brain in place. That way it could still autonomously eat, crap, breathe, and so on.
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Seems like this could be extremely useful if humans could have it. I know, pain has a useful biological purpose, but humans are smart enough to know that red liquid coming out of you = bad without being too incapacitated by pain to properly put the bandage on.
I went straight to military applications. I doubt this guy's research ends with cows, but having a practical application probably helps immensely on the DARPA grant request.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm not a vegetarian myself but being a political activist in all kinds of things, etc. I know well over a dozen vegetarians and vegans. I have never heard anyone claim that they wouldn't eat meat because of the physical suffering of the animals. That idea is not only new to me but sounds absurd.
Most vegetarians and vegans don't eat meat because how cruel the whole system is. Having very large amounts of living, feeling beings raised in overcrowded conditions where some (chickens) can barely move and others (pigs) are overfed so much and given so little exercise that they can't even stand (their legs aren't strong enough to carry them) towards the end... That is what people feel to be horrible. Not the killing (it happens in nature too) or the physical pain (To my understanding, most aren't in constant physical pain) but treating living, feeling beings like that. Most I've discussed this with have said that they would eat meat if the animals were treated better.
This "solution" doesn't remove suffering or cruelty, it removes the physical pain involved, which never was the major issue.
That all said, I'm sure that this could have some other practical applications.
You know, the ones that come out to your table and ask you what part(s) you would like to eat?
... why are they made of meat?
Breed a cow that wants to be eaten
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
So they would still feel physical pain, but won't care about it? If they react to painful sensations negatively, then at least they still seem to have some self-preservation mechanisms working... But even if painful sensations are not unpleasent, it is still pain, which is still cruel in a way. Harming a masochist is still cruel to a degree, no matter how much they enjoy it. Then of course behaviouralists would probably want to argue that the fact that they react negatively to pain is what defines them as having an unpleasent experience. So really, what difference does this make? Do they just forget that pain hurts or something?
Food for thought: humans born with such a disorder where they feel no pain, the children routinely chew through their fingers and lips because they are unable to determine when to stop...
If you engineer animals who feel no pain you are very likely to see the same picture.
People who eat meat aren't terribly concerned about the pain animals feel. People who don't eat meat aren't turned off by it simply because the animals feel a moment of pain. Whether the animal feels pain or not is irrelevant. It's still a living creature and THAT is what turns off many (most???) vegetarians/vegans/etc.
And next we'll engineer them to _want_ to be eaten. *sheesh*
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So if something can't feel pain, it's now "ok" to hurt it?
I mean seriously, I'm not a PETAnut or animal rights activist, I'm not even a vegetarian but c'mon, that's ludicrous.
By that logic, you can cheerfully stick a pin over & over into your coworker that has leprosy - he can't feel it, it's ok!
-Styopa
Now we have a way to ethicly do something that's both really stupid ( read inefficient ) and unsustainable . What a concept. Soldiers beware, you're next.
From Wikipedia.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_characters_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy
"The quadruped Dish of the Day is an Ameglian Major Cow, a Ruminant specifically bred to not only have the desire to be eaten, but to be capable of saying so quite clearly and distinctly. When asked if he would like to see the Dish of the Day, Zaphod replies: "let's meet the meat." The Major Cow's quite vocal and emphatic desire to be consumed by Milliways' patrons greatly distresses Arthur Dent, and the Dish is nonplussed by a queasy Arthur's subsequent order of a green salad, since he knows "many vegetables that are very clear" on the point of not wanting to be eaten -- which was part of the reason for the creation of the Ameglian Major Cow in the first place. After Zaphod orders four rare steaks, the Dish announces that he is nipping off to the kitchen to shoot himself. Though he states, "I'll be very humane," this does not comfort Arthur at all."
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Pain is not my problem with eating animals. Inhumane conditions are the problem! Removing the "pain" part of it would open up even more excuses for factory farming. Seeing that an animal is in pain when it's killed is essential to respecting its life and purpose--and to preventing over-abundance of killing. A hunter should kill out of need and learns that when he sees and animal suffer (read the story of the Rainbow Warrior). Factory farms and lack of pain remove us from this natural cycle. ugh. Don't get me started...
engineering PEOPLE not to feel so damn guilty about eating cows?
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
If this is a serious post, please go away. If not, please go away anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandersnatchi_(Known_Space)
Most "free range" cattle are confined by barb wire or electric fences. If they feel no pain how will they know not to attempt to go through? I am in no way making a statement on how humane barb wire and electric fences are or aren't. Just discussing the current reality and pointing out a potential adoption issue.
I have heard about a similar human condition that is quite serious as you have to be careful that the person does not poke his own eyes out or similar self harm I would imagine similar problems could occur.
And i would imagine that the physiological effects would be worse then the physical in cruel conditions anyways.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The impact on the animals is not the most important aspect of high-cruelty industrial farming. The real problem is that the final product will be of degraded quality, diseased and cross contaminated in large poorly maintained packing plants. Giving farmers and corporations another reason that they can ignore the condition of the animal will not really help anything.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So we're going to use an ethically uncertain scientific practice to make ourselves feel better about ethically uncertain agricultural practices?
What about the environmental impacts of factory farming? What about the impact on global food stocks and security when diverse suppliers are replaced by a few large conglomerates offering genetically-tweaked (for the supplier's benefit) organisms that may or may not have long-term health consequences?
Since when is animal suffering the only thing to consider in the factory farming debate, or even the most important part of the debate?
When will humanity stop trying to cover up short-sightedness with more short-sighted solutions? Will I ever stop asking questions? How many licks DOES it take to get to the tootsie-roll center of a tootsie pop?
"This could end much of the concern about cruel farming practices"
Or it could lead to really cruel farming practices since the animal cannot feel pain.
Suffering != Pain
I like it. The racket that cattle make when I am eviscerating them during feeding while in my wolf phase wakes the farmers. Next thing I know I have a band of rabble chasing me with pitchforks and torches.
Feeling is a part of meaning in itself. It just might be an idea to give a stimulant to the desensitized and rationlising scientists behind this notion and revive their humanity.
Maybe we can genetically engineer ourselves to not eat !
Screw feelings yeah progress woot
*THX 1138 back to your cell*
I grew up on a farm and have killed and eaten many animals as a part of my daily life as a young man.
Around 20 years ago I stopped eating meat altogether after a fairly gruesome botched attempt at killing an animal. It left an indelible (inedible?) impression on me that I couldn't shake. My reasons for maintaining that vegetarianism however were manyfold.
1/ I've realised I simply don't need to eat meat to be healthy: I very rarely get sick and have am in very good physical condition.
2/ I found eating meat to be less metabolically efficient: I noticed an improvement in my sleep patterns and did not feel sluggish/tired after dinners.
3/ Eating meat is environmentally inefficient: Rather than cutting down trees to grow plants to grow grains to feed to cattle to form into meat, some of which will be eaten, just eat the plants directly. A huge portion of the world's C02 comes from cow 'emissions' meanwhile there is an increasingly lack of plant surface to transform this C02 back into oxygen.
4/ Meat now smells and (when accidentally eaten tastes) somehow rotten. It's just not something I would ever want to put in my mouth anymore than carpet or polystyrene. Meat is a dietary habit, cut with a kick of testosterone. You can get over it.
5/ Animal meat is absolutely murder, of course it is! It doesn't matter whether it's aware of it or not, whether it's feeling pain (almost all farm animals are utterly terrified just prior to death), it's murder to satisfy a dietary habit no matter which way you look at it.. When I was killing cows and pigs with a knife of a gun I was murdering them: killing them against their will.
6/ Eating meat is unncessary in my 21 century western dietary context: People started eating meat out of necessity in harsh conditions. Our bodies reflect that we haven't done it for long: unlike cats, sharks and dogs, we have never killed animals with our own hands and/or teeth. We've had to invent weapons to do so, the same weapons we used to kill other people. Just as I do not need to kill other people, expanding or defending territory, I don't need to eat animal parts to be a healthy human. And what of the mythic Food Chain? If you think paying people to prod cows, sheep and pigs into the back of a truck, drive them scared out of their minds for miles in their own shit, lead them into a large building with men in white overalls bearing stun guns and knives reflects anything as congenital as a 'food chain', you're out of your depth..)
7/ Meat from farms is, in general, far from a safe or remotely 'natural' product these days. In fact most meat from the U.S is banned here in Europe because it's so augmented with artificial hormones considered harmful to human bodies.
.. no reaction to injury, internal or external, which could lead to instant death at some point. This is why most good doctors do not prescribe pain medication for life threatening, pain-related illnesses.
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Suddenly hell bovines reign and the apocalypse is nigh, and they can't feel fear or pain, you can't reason with it!
Moo moo moo, MOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
WOW!!
Whoever wrote this... I can't believe...
This person is definitely a psychopath.
Cows aren't as stupid as people think they are. Cows know that death is coming their way when they're in the slaughterhouse and even if they can't feel the physical pain, they are put under a lot of emotional stress.
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
I think Douglas Adams would find the adjustment of P311 amusing.
Pardon the caps but this is horribly repellant. You need pain to learn how not to damage yourself. Children who are born who can not feel pain are the ones who end up with their tongues and lips chewed open by their teeth and who have loads of broken bones since they can not feel they are harming themselves. Think of what would happen when two bulls challenge each other for dominance.
Animals who can not feel pain will damage themselves repeatedly until their parts just break.
This is an amazingly poorly thought out proposition.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Let's just put this in perspective, right ? A feutus, 2 months after conception, is capable of more complex reasoning (and feels pain) than a cow. Yet abortion ... that's no problem, right ? A child's brain starts up and starts learning and feeling the 18th day after conception, long before even the most perceptive of women realizes she's pregnant. Yet we allow abortion, but feel sorry for animals which will never attain the intellectual capacity a human feutus develops before it even connects blood vessels to the mother.
Something is a bit ... well, stupid, about this idiocy.
And don't worry about this plan : it's a non-starter. Animals who feel no pain for whatever reason are born all of the time. So are humans who feel no pain. You might think this is a blessing, right ? Think again ... In case you're wondering why there are so few of them : most of these people die from idiotic accidents (like biting off critical body parts, I shit you not) at a young age.
I seriously doubt that once these cows turn out to have zero feedback between tongue and teeth, then bite of their tongue, and refuse to eat any more until they die, this idiocy will have lost all appearance of either relieving pain or being economically interesting. Or they refuse to turn back at the edge of the meadow, no matter how much barbed wire they get wrapped around them or how much blood they lose (actually bulls have serious problems with that even with perfectly functioning pain nerves)
Besides growing meat directly, without animal involvement at all, is getting underway. Just google it. That will presumably be cheaper and will present zero ethical issues. And it will get rid having to cut nerves or blood vessels out of steaks. Hurray. Also it will be more efficient. The sad truth is that plants are very inefficient solar panels, and animals are utter disasters at turning biomatter into meat. There is no existing plant that has 2% efficiency at photosynthesis, and there is no animal that has a 2% efficient digestive system (humans are actually just about the most efficient animals on the planet, and while everyone thinks it's intelligence that allows us to spread, it might very well be that we have, by far, the most efficient metabolism (measured by testing energy intake versus movement performance)). And as we all know 2%*2% = 0.4% efficiency solar energy -> meat (and that's only for animals captured in the wild, farmed animals are less efficient). The most efficient amongst humans are about 2%^3 or they use about 1 watt from around 8 million delivered by the sun.
As population rises this 8 million solar watts to give 1 human 1 watt (which will allow a california resident to maintain body temperature in the summer for about 3 minutes) will have to get better. We can't modify humans, so we'll have to eat more efficiently produced foods.
I don't see other predators crying over their prey feeling pain when they eat them - why should we?
...so this must be taken seriously.
I asked the Flying Spaghetti Monster if it was wrong to eat cows. He did not say so, so I'm chopping away!
I refuse to concede that any mere man has the right to tell me what is right vs what is wrong. Anyone else that believes in the ethicist as an arbiter of morality is a retard.
This is my sig.
Knowing that an animal is self aware is part of the fun of killing it and eating it. You don't see lions or sharks waxing sentimental when they hunt and devour their prey do you? If the theory of man is that we are not so far from the animals that we think, then, why wouldn't we enjoy killing? Certainly the enjoyment of killing is a predictable response to evolution.
Sure, you can tell me that humans don't like it. Really, they don't like themselves being killed. But, I bet you could put a person on a train driving past a bunch of Buffalo and shoot them until they are almost extinct for no more purpose than the killing. Oh wait, we already did that!
This is my sig.
The whole reason we have industrial farming is because meat tastes good and everyone wants some slightly worse tasting meat more often than some premium stuff less often. Sausage in the morning, beef at lunch and dinner and maybe even a midnight snack, the world is a meat eater's paradise. Yum yum.
I think vegetables fricking suck donkey dick. The only vegetables that don't suck are green beans and corn, and maybe potatoes - if you have some sort of butter and meat gravy to go with the potatoes, or fry them in beef fat. But eating alfafa and cauliflower and trying to pretend a bunch of mashed up sprouts is some kind of a hamburger, that sucks.
This is my sig.
We're humans, we'd install it even more....
This is my sig.
Since when did giving cows Leprosy become a moral imperative?
Cruelty isn't just inflicting physical pain. One aspect of slaughterhouse design involves proper lighting, flooring, and sound control.
See the book, Animals in Translation. It's an eye-opener on the subject.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
The only way to stop pain is to stop inflicting it. I can't wait for a true alien form to come to Earth and treat us as cow. Once they'll have taken the pain away, all that will remain will be a living nightmare. Respect life and stop treating living creatures insanely. Now go have your bloody burger and keep on supporting the cattle industry. Cheers
Genetically engineered humans that WANT to be enslaved.
This is total bull. Just because something can't experience pain doesn't mean that you are not treating it poorly. Talk about the ultimate exploitation. As a caretaker for another species YOU would know it's being mistreated/handled even if IT was not able to perceive it.
This also assumes that pain is the only factor in whether an animal is 'happy/content' or not. Squalid conditions or inhumane treatment are still going to cause stress, discomfort, and overall unpleasant/undesirable results in a creature even if it can't feel something as selective as pain.
Perhaps. But not the nightmare. Or the diseases rampant in corporate farming.
And a silly thought experiment for a philosopher. If we could anesthetize a city first, it would be moral to nuke it?
'The waiter approached. "Would you like to see the menu?" he said, "or would you like to meet the Dish of the Day?" "Huh?" said Ford. "Huh?" said Arthur. "Huh?" said Trillian. "That's cool," said Zaphod, "we'll meet the meat." '
You are exactly correct. I've never heard them object to hunting of non-threatened species in order to acquire food. (Many object to hunting animals for sport, though)
The thing is that only pretty small amount of meat you eat is acquired by hunting. What you eat at school, work, a fast-food restaurant... None of that is hunted from the nature. So if you want to drop the meat that hasn't been hunted and err on the side of caution, you'll probably lower your meat consumption by over 90%. At that point you could just as well say that you are a vegetarian.
In addition, if you eat nearly no meat at all (as you would) for extended periods of time, you will begin disliking the taste quite a lot. After some years your body is so used to not having to digest meat that you might actually get pretty bad stomach aches if you even occasionally eat meat. (Similar effects happens with pretty much any type of food. Try only eating healthy foods for two years and I can pretty much guarantee that a pizza with a lot of fat will taste horrible and make your stomach hurt.)
So once you choose not to eat meat produced at a farm, you pretty much choose not to eat meat.
And well, I said most. Of course there are some that still would ask "Why should we eat meat if we can just eat vegetables?".
the fact that the farming industry generates more greenhouse gasses than the transportation industry, and that more of our absolute /need/ to reduce meet consumption rest on the environment, rather than the "feelings" of actual animals.
... u r doin it wrong.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
Wow, first we could genetically engineer some animals to not feel pain.. then just think.. a whole army that feels no pain, they would fight on regardless of injury (see Monty Python and the "I'm not dead yet" skit) not to mention there would be no worries about lame issues like torture. I think no matter how well meaning (?) this could be for cows and pigs, it has horrible implications for the rest of us in general.
Seems that I got tagged as troll and everyone missed my point.
I was objecting to "Pain 1.0". The rest of my post described either Pain-Alternate that is ignorable or Pain 2.0 with a toggle switch.
Interesting how everyone ignored my second sentence.
Thank you for further encouraging me to put fallacies back on my study list. I did not advocate the genetic disorder of 0-pain. You must have also missed my other post tapping the "Haberman Device" of C. Smith fame. Someone else did have a point about cognitive abilities; I'd still go with my instinct that a Tech solution would allow options to pain that can be implemented upon demand.
But then invoking insults is pure adhominem which serves no further purpose than to attempt a Closer to a discussion.
You get chops for research. However those articles discuss the Either-Or situation. I am discussing alternatives.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hi, I think it's worth pointing out that this post is not really an accurate description of the original article. I don't say that genetically engineering animals that don't feel pain, "may be an acceptable alternative to factory farming." In fact, I'm pretty clear that given all of the problems associated with factory farming, the best solution would be to eliminate it altogether. My point is that *if* it does not seem likely that factory farming will be going away in the near future, then in the meantime we should reduce the amount of suffering it causes. Also, many of the points people are bringing up are discussed in the original Neuroethics article, which you can find here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/vrv4m6288w702123/fulltext.pdf . The people who are assuming I am making some kind of "stupid" mistake by equating suffering with pain or not being aware of the condition known as congenital insensitivity to pain would be well-served by reading the full article first. Surprisingly enough, the entire content of a 4500 word essay is not represented in this five sentence summary, or even in the two page summary from New Scientist. This is not to say that either summary was unfair, but just that before claiming "the author stupidly didn't think of X", you might want to read what the author actually said.
The quadruped Dish of the Day is an Ameglian Major Cow, a Ruminant specifically bred to not only have the desire to be eaten, but to be capable of saying so quite clearly and distinctly.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This looks pretty straight forward and shouldnÂt even get it to the slashdot frontpage. Its just a crazy guy saying crazy stuff.
Regarding the topic:
The pain sensation is there for a reason. It makes cow stop biting their tongue, or makes them poop when they really really have to. More importantly, it makes them look sick. You cant treat a cow that doesn't look sick. All animals that wont experience pain will end up unhealthy or sick, and thats BAD. Please take note of the stupidity in this article.
And last but not least: where i reside veal receives great care and doesn't suffer a bit. I'm not speaking for other regions on this globe ,but the Netherlands has very strict laws regarding welfare of food-industry animals. Farmers and the veal food industry as a whole are far ahead of world standards, and the dutch law. Animals have a good life, please don't be stupid.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
You heard it here first.
Now please discuss.
Anyone who thinks this idea is a good one must be crazy. It makes me crazy to think that people actually care enough about a cows feeling when they are slaughtered. To me if you believe this you are a hypocrite. You either have to eat factory farmed food, eat vegetarian, or eat sustainable organic meat. There is no middle ground and there sure doesn't need to be a pain free cow.
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