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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.
...eliminates the soul-sucking ennui of day-to-day life.
I think they're missing the point.
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
Even if the animal cannot feel physical pain, it's still going to be spending its entire life in cramped, inhumane living conditions.
Bingo. The problem isn't the physical pain the animals feel. It's the terrible conditions they're made to live in. Most animals can't contemplate death (we count as at least one exception) but I am pretty sure they're able to be dissatisfied with living their entire lives in an overcrowded box doing nothing but gaining weight.
To borrow an example from somewhere in Michael Pollan's excellent The Omnivore's Dilemma, pigs are weaned off their mother's milk after ten days so they can be put on a special feed that makes them gain weight faster in modern industrial meat production. It helps the bottom line, but it does leave the improperly-weaned pig with a lifelong urge to chew and suck. What's the only thing to chew and suck in a pen full of your fellow pig? Their tails, of course. So they chew and suck the tails of their fellow-pigs, who, unlike normal, healthy pigs, have given up fighting off any potential tail-biters.
That causes infection, which raises costs. The common "solution" is to cut the pigs' tails off when they're young. Without anesthetic (Why bother? A pig can't sue you for inhumane treatment...). Sure, having pain-free pigs would make the act of cutting off the tail less inhumane, but it's not really solving the problem of why you need to cut these pigs' tails off in the first place.
In my view, the problem is industrialized agriculture practices. The approach has been: treat these complex, living, breathing animals as simple meat-growing machines. Pack them together as close as possible, that kind of thing. When they get sick, the solution isn't to ask why they're living knee-deep in their own sewage like no healthy animal should, it's to put them on antibiotics. When they get depressed and start eating each others' tails off, the solution isn't to ask why they feel the need to chew and suck their whole lives. The solution is to cut the tail off early. When people begin to complain about the pain these animals feel, the solution isn't to ask why these animals' lives are so painful, it's to take away their capacity for pain.