Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
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
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?
EvilCON - Made Famous by
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.
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 ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
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.
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.
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
+1 Haberman Device
"Scanner, are your bones broken? If so, go see a medic."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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?
Happy New Year, it's 1984!
"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!
Smivs on the intertubes!
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.
I put myself through my undergrad and post grad work by working as a bouncer in a whisky drinking/fist fighting bar in Montana. I assure you that pain serves a very useful function. The average non-slashdotter tends to react to logical thought and formed arguments far less strongly as they will to something more basal such as an elbow to the nose.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Sounds like we need an extension of SNMP to the nervous system.
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.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Right. Just leave your hand on that burner, then, and tell us how pain doesn't serve any useful function.
'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?
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
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
Pain is a very useful sensation. Pain keeps people from doing stupid things, or from CONTINUING to do stupid things.
Ever been burned by hot water? If you were to sit in water over 110 for very long you would litterally boil yourself to death. When you put your feet in the tub and scream, that's your body's way of telling you not to boil yourself.
Ever had a broken bone? When you move a broken bone your body quickly tells you that doing so isn't the best idea by kicking in the pain. Moving it will lenghen the time it takes to heal.
Touch a hot stove often? cut yourself while shaving? sunburn? all of those things are things you want to avoid, but wouldn't know to without pain.
And you do NOT want a 1200lb cow without the ability to feel pain. That fence that keeps it from escaping onto the freeway wouldn't hold her in very long if the cow didn't feel pain. Cows are large, but not very bright. They don't understand what a car is. They don't understand what a road is. They just know they're wandering.
Evolution is a wonderful thing. If we don't need something, evolution gets rid of it. And just because we've gotten all technological and all now does not diminish the fact that we still need to feel pain.
--Forest C. Adcock--
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.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
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!
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?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
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.
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.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
Lucky me I have an absolute lack of psycho-reaction. Stupid marines and street fighters want to start shit with me and I barely notice (or care), so they get bored (read: frustrated they can't get enough of a reaction to get the adrenaline rush they need to throw themselves into a fight) and leave me the fuck alone. Or if they do go into a rage, they're too stupid to fight properly; but in that case, you're right, pain works wonders. Too bad I can't PCL them... seriously, these are marines and over-muscled gym rats we're talking about, my first reaction is to dislocate something so they cry and gtfo, do you really think I can take these people in an extended fight?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
110? Farenheit? I can't keep 110C water liquid without several additional pounds of pressure, and 110F is not dangerous (to me). Is your body configured such that you can't reliably store/eliminate thermal energy in a controlled way? 110 is rather cold... far too cold for me to shower in.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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*
--- http://www.astroturtle.com
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
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.
Pain is NOT a useful sensation ! Touch is.. discomfort is.. pain ISN'T !
Ever throught about being restrained and had someone pull your fingernails out ? how does that serve anything ?
Or someone pointing a gun at your head and telling you you have a minute to live.. or being told you have terminal cancel.. how does the pain help in a situation where there is no hope anyway?
Oh.. and so why did the dentists invent anesthetics in the first place ? (sorry.. no novocaine there.. pain helps you realize that me drilling a hole in your molar isn't really for your own good.. please stand still while I secure those shackles to the chair..)
The cow may feel *discomfort* (and will back out of the barbed wire fence).. but pain is useless if it can be prevented (and the cow will die a peaceful death - and the meat will taste better too !)
And finally.. no.. evolution doesn't get rid of something if it doesn't serve a purpose.. evolution will get rid of something if it is statistically more likely that you will live long enough to have offspring if you do not have that feature (because, again, statistically - you are less likely to pass it on to your children)!
And if Homo Sapiens find ways to remove (or at least switch off) something that no longer serves an evolutionary purpose - or for that matter - basic safety - but is only a leftover of the time pain *might* have served some evolutionary purpose, then I'm all for it !
--Ivan
I'm just the opposite.
The health type go overboard if they don't eat meat at all. It's correct that too much meat in your diet is bad for you, but as long as they don't tell me what I can or can't eat, they're entitled to their opinion.
The religious type are just as entitled to their opinion – again, as long as they don't tell me what I can and can't do. This works both ways, see.
The ethical type (like you) are the ones that can go sit in a corner. Sorry, but that's my opinion. As you said, humans and animals have been killing and eating each other for thousands if not millions of years. Sure it's unethical to kill animals for, say, entertainment, but we have to eat. Meat is both tasty and good for you (if you don't overdo it). I've killed and eaten a number of animals myself; they were quite tasty. I have no guilt whatsoever about the ethicality of those acts.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
Ever throught about being restrained and had someone pull your fingernails out ?
Without pain, what would keep a toddler from pulling his fingernails out? (Besides that it is pretty difficult).
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.
You are a complete moron to not even being able to google stuff like this before forming your opinion in 2 seconds.
No pain is a very serious genetic disorder.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/42140.php
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/conditions/01/27/rare.conditions/index.html
http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/14726_pain.html
"Those people, who do not feel any pain at all, usually die before they turn 25"
"A lot of parents would be happy to have a baby, who does not wake them up at night."..."When Ashlyn's teeth started growing at the age of six months, the girl shredded her own lips with them."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6379795/
âoeSome people would say thatâ(TM)s a good thing. But no, itâ(TM)s not,â says Tara Blocker, Ashlynâ(TM)s mother. âoePainâ(TM)s there for a reason. It lets your body know somethingâ(TM)s wrong and it needs to be fixed. Iâ(TM)d give anything for her to feel pain.â
The untreatable disease also makes Ashlyn incapable of sensing extreme temperatures â" hot or cold â" disabling her bodyâ(TM)s ability to cool itself by sweating. Otherwise, her senses are normal.
So yes, your opinion is quite stupid.
...then why can't we graze on the same grass that they can?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Suffering != Pain
Yes, in humans, suffering involves a lot more factors. However I am sure that cows do not attend cow school, do not realize that there exists more "world" outside what they immediately observe and have observed all their lives. The are also not aware that they are destined to be turned into hamburger. There is no elder cow hanging around to "teach" all these young cows about how great the world used to be, and how miserable they should feel today, despite the lack of any physical pain.
Idiot, go make love to a tree.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No. No, you would not literally boil yourself (unless you are at some ridiculously high elevation where the boiling point of water is under 100 F).
Instead, you would suffer tissue damage due to electrolyte imbalances and some protein denaturation.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Like you said.. it *IS* difficult to pry one's own finger nails.. but you usually don't go as far as *actually* feeling pain before you stop !
And a toddler would stop doing it as soon as some *discomfort* (not pain) sets in.
If some (obviously deranged) third party were to submit him/her to *that* kind of experience, then I'd rather my child feel some mild discomfort (that would prevent him/her from self inflicting damage) than searing pain !
--Ivan
Great, now I have an incurable woody.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
That makes sense only if you classify pain and discomfort as separate things instead of levels on a scale. What is your basis for believing you could make an animal that can be discomforted but unable to feel pain?
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.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
+1 Montana. What part?
-IOVAR Web Dev Platform
Pain is such a strong feeling that the body reacts to pain automatically, much faster than you would be able to do if you had to think about it.
Bozeman...used to bounce/bartend at the Slegion Club.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
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.
The funny thing is, it's basically backward from the suggestion in TFA. "Pain" is a signal that the nerves transmit to the brain. "Discomfort" is the brain's reaction to that signal. TFA suggests that, although the animal presumably still senses the pain, the brain doesn't have a negative response to it. I.e. the animal is able to feel pain, but not discomforted by it.
Sorta like Arnold in the Terminator... hmm, terminator cows, that's not a pleasant thought.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
As with many posts here, you're missing a lot of details. The removal of pain is intended for factory farms. Places where the animals don't generally move much or interact, or have to be kept in pastures by electric fences.
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.
Have you ever studied the ethics of eating animal meat? It's actually an interesting topic that raises a number of questions.
Firstly, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with eating meat, independent of how the meat was acquired. Say that you find a cow (or some other animal) that has already died of natural causes. Most of us don't find anything morally wrong with eating that dead animal. (We may hold reservations due to sanitation-type concerns, but that's another matter.)
The real moral dilemma relates specifically to "killing an animal for the purposes of consuming its flesh". The GP poster was right-on in his comparison of animals to people with severe mental disabilities. This point represents THE most compelling argument (that I have heard) against killing animals to eat them. I'll try to explain what that argument is.
There surely exist people in the world who are so severely mentally disabled that they hold no more capacity for abilities related to reasoning, perception, and learning than would some of the more intelligent animals (e.g. chimps or elephants). Assuming that one does not think it morally acceptable to kill and consume these severely mentally disabled people, the question is "what makes these severely mentally disabled people different from animals in that it is okay to kill and consume the animals, but not kill and consume these severely mentally disabled people?"
In answering the question, some people will have a tendency to go down the path of "humans are just different than animals...they're special." We may then inquire as to what it is that makes humans special. If the response is something along the lines of "humans have increased mental capabilities", we will likely point out that the original question specifically referred to humans with severe mental disabilities, and these humans cannot therefore be understood as distinct from animals in that regard.
Someone may attempt to maintain, on religious grounds, that "humans have souls and animals do not; that is what makes humans special". If that is your line of reasoning, you may stop reading here and return when you have compelling empirical evidence that supports humans having souls while animals do not.
There may still be those who will maintain that "humans are just special, period" while unable to provide any reason for this assertion. This kind of reasoning (or "non-reasoning") is very similar to thought processes used in attempts to justify discrimination against individuals of a certain race, religion, age, etc. But in our case, instead of racism, perhaps it would be called "speciesism". The definition of "speciesism" would be something along the lines of "discriminating against a member of a species for no reason other than the fact that they belong to the species". Like racism, there is no rational basis for "speciesism", so we will not adopt speciesism-based ideas for the purposes of a rational conversation. (Note that, just like with race, there are times when it is rational to discriminate between different species. I am referring specifically to cases of unjustified discrimination -- making a distinction between two things without reason.)
So where has this taken us? It isn't clear that there is a relevant difference between severely mentally disabled people and animals such that it's morally okay to kill and eat one, but not the other. There are really 3 options here:
1. Determine what the morally significant difference is between an animal and a severely mentally disabled person such that it is acceptable to kill and eat one but not the other.
2. Hold the belief that killing to eat either severely mentally disabled people or animals is morally wrong.
3. Hold the belief that killing to eat either severely mentally disabled people or animals is morally acceptable.
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
He mentioned bath, not shower. In that context, he's correct.
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?
... 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..
110 for a bath would be too much cold. That's like people talking about how their pool's so warm because it's got a heater.. the water's fucking 83 degrees, it's frigid! 5 minutes and I'm shivering!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
You heard it here first.
Now please discuss.
It's not 83 degrees, that's why. If you immerse yourself in 110 degree water, you will trend inexorably toward 110 degrees yourself. When you get there, you will find that your biochemistry no longer works - this is why fevers over 103 are worrying and over 106 are usually fatal. Now, if you like a hot bath, and you get out before your body cooks, that's fine. But you can't take 110 forever, like you could (say) 95.