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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.
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.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
Have you tried heroin?
This is why the pace of technological growth is slowing. 50 years ago, people would have looked at this and thought, wow, we can bbq live steak, and it won't try to run away.
Those people had ideas, big ideas. They looked at nuclear bombs and thought "Hey, we could get rid of those mountains blocking our view".
That is the spirit of innovation that drives true progress...
Maybe we can genetically engineer cows to not taste so delicious -- problem solved!
Just because you sold your soul to the devil that needn't make you a teetotaler. --The Devil and Daniel Webster
Precisely. If you remove their pain sensors you might also remove their fear sensors. Then we would have angry, fearless cows who can feel no pain mercilessly dealing out revenge on their former masters, burning and killing everything in their path. I think this is a bad idea.
If your servers screamed every time you had to reboot them, would you so willingly install Microsoft software on them?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
So we'll have leather-clad BDSM cows in high heels whipping each others ?
Yes! Leather made from their own hides, and it's cruelty-free!
Well, for the love of $DIETY, don't forget to set a hard-to-guess private community string, unless you want random strangers tweaking the writeable objects in your neural MIB.
That would be madness!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I'm from PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals), and we'll take off all of our clothes in protest. And unlike that OTHER group, we're not a bunch of hot vegetarians, so you will not enjoy the spectacle .
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
No it isn't. What is really funny is all the vegetarians tend to be Evolutionists who haven't figured out that Humans are Omnivores designed to eat just about anything. oops, I said Designed, gasp.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What? Maybe for beef, I'm not sure...
But for pigs, it's really important that you kill them unexpectedly, or the meat gets an off flavor. I always used to drop mine off at the butchers, where he'd treat them nicely for a couple days for them to get content and acclimated, then he'd shoot them when they weren't expecting it.
This is why all the best butchers are ninjas and/or members of the Spanish Inquisition.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You need opiates for that.
holy shit... imagine if this procedure was done to Canadians!
"Do they go on a rampage?"
That would be a pain free sheep, a pain free cow would go on a bullpage.
This is why all the best butchers are ninjas and/or members of the Spanish Inquisition.
Ninjas I can understand, but I wasn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition.
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.
Yeah but fish are ugly.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!