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.

Comments

Just like taking an aspirin...

[jeffb (2.718)]

...eliminates the soul-sucking ennui of day-to-day life.

I think they're missing the point.

Re:Just like taking an aspirin...

[uncle-gendo]

You need opiates for that.

Insanity

[Philip K Dickhead]

CAN != Should

Re:Insanity

[geekoid]

While true, how about you make a point on why they shouldn't?

Um, how about no?

[Millennium]

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.

Re:Um, how about no?

[mevets]

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...

Re:Um, how about no?

[Phase Shifter]

Not to mention, it will be end of barbed wire fences as an effective means of containing cattle.
Probably a reduction in the effectiveness of electric fences, too.
Makes you wonder what kind of conditions they expect to raise the cattle under.

Re:Um, how about no?

[InlawBiker]

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.

Re:Um, how about no?

[berashith]

holy shit... imagine if this procedure was done to Canadians!

At last!

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Now I can build my impervious-to-pain super-soldier army! Thank you, cow scientists!

Re:At last!

[FlyingSquidStudios]

I like the way you think, sir. Would you care to go halfsies with me on a skull-shaped island fortress? I'll bring the death laser.

Kind of Creepy and Absurd

[Comatose51]

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?

Re:Kind of Creepy and Absurd

[ChienAndalu]

The next step is to grow meat without a central nervous system at all, in arbitrary size.

It sounds creepy, but only because it is unusual. When you think about it, this method of producing meat is superior.

Re:Kind of Creepy and Absurd

[ratnerstar]

Maybe we can genetically engineer cows to not taste so delicious -- problem solved!

Re:Kind of Creepy and Absurd

[ArsonSmith]

I think we should engineer plants to feel pain. That way we can screw over the pussy vegetarians and they're attempts to attain a moral high ground.

Re:Kind of Creepy and Absurd

[93,000]

I think you are confusing beef and veal. Normal beef cows are not confined to a tiny pen.

People unfamiliar with farming underestimate the degree to which the comfort of animals is taken into account. Stressed steers are less healthy. Dairy cows produce significantly less milk when stressed or uncomfortable. Some dairies play music all day because they've found it has a calming effect and increases production.

Like anything, it's all about money. But comfortable animals help the bottom line.

Re:Kind of Creepy and Absurd

[Archangel Michael]

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 .

Re:Kind of Creepy and Absurd

[mdarksbane]

I noticed that when I went to the livestock judging at the local fair recently. It was all kids' 4-H projects, and the judges were taking very careful time to explain how important it was that you handle the livestock gently, as bruised meat is essentially worthless.

I know some farming operations are rougher than others (factory farmed chickens for example), but all of the beef cattle I see raised around here spend most of their days pretty much the same as they do in the wild - wandering around through a wide open field eating grass.

The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Stupid

[acon1modm]

I think cattle are kept in individual pens just large enough for them to fit in, they can't even turn around. I don't think they can get into much trouble.

I could be wrong about this , I just saw it in a documentary.

Re:Dmritard96

[DJ Jones]

Have you tried heroin?

Re:Dmritard96

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Actually a worse idea than it sounds. There are, extremely rarely, children born insensitive to pain. Their survival rates are not good.

Now, particularly for adults, the ability to sense pain as a mere signal, rather than as, well, pain, would be quite nice.

Re:What is this doing under idle?

[conspirator57]

there are people who cannot feel pain.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/915341/people_who_cant_feel_pain.html?cat=52

counterintuitively, it's not a good thing.

what would be a good thing would be partially desensitized to pain. that way you get the information ("hey, you should pull your hand off the stove burner") without the incapacitating effects.

its not the pain

[gbrandt]

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

Re:its not the pain

[cowscows]

Although they might not be as well developed as human emotions, anyone who's spent any significant amount of time with an mammal at least as complex as a dog or cat should be convinced that they most certainly can experience states of mind that include things like fear or stress. They are definitely more comfortable in some situations than they are in others. I personally have not spent much time around cows, but it seems rather likely to me that someone who has would easily be able to tell what sorts of situations they find unpleasant.

Brainless!

[Smivs]

Why not just 'engineer' them to have no brain at all, just like the guy who suggested this!

Re:Brainless!

[Brian Gordon]

Why is he brainless? I'd feel a lot more comfortable eating meat that was "grown" like a vegetable than eating meat that's the body of a slaughtered animal. Brainless cows sound like a perfect solution. Given of course that it's even possible.

Re:Brainless!

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you are saying is that you are willing to bastardize nature so you don't have any guilt? Animals eat other animals, it's a normal process. If you feel guilt you can be a vegetarian...

Re:Brainless!

[lysergic.acid]

This is still a retarded solution to a non-existant problem (or one we have no desire to solve).

First of all, there are already humane ways to kill animals (and humans) without them feeling any discomfort—and they're a heck of a lot simpler/cheaper than genetically engineering animals to feel no pain. Aside from creating another genetically-modified life-form that megacorporations like Monsanto can patent can make billions from it, there's nothing to be gained from this.

You want to kill an animal without making it suffer? Here's a solution that costs about $50 to implement:

1. 1. Build a plexiglass box measuring about 2'x2'x2'.
2. 2. Hook up a tank of ntirous to it.
3. 3. Cut a slot on one side of the box large enough for an animal to put its head through (optionally, install a rubber curtain to form a more perfect seal).
4. 4. Place a bowl of cattle feed in the box.

Tests conducted on pigs have shown that the animal feels no discomfort and will willingly keep their head in the contraption until they pass out and eventually die from asphyxiation. This is just one of the many already existing solutions out there (like shooting the animal in the head with a gun).

The real problem isn't that there's no way to kill animals currently without them feeling pain. The problem is that the meat industry, and most consumers, really don't care how livestock are treated.

Even if the animal cannot feel physical pain, it's still going to be spending its entire life in cramped, inhumane living conditions.

Re:Brainless!

[xappax]

As you hinted at, the killing may or may not be painless, it's the part before the killing that's obviously cruel. Part of that is because it's physically painful to be packed in so tightly you can't move, covered in infections, etc. However being an animal in a factory farm is probably also terrifying on a more abstract level, even if you can't feel physical pain. That's a lot more difficult to change without restructuring the whole way the meat industry operates. Until such a restructuring happens, I'm not buying what they're selling.

Re:Brainless!

[Znork]

Cows really aren't aware there going to die

Do you know if there is/have any links to any concrete evidence for that besides the obvious feelgood factor?

Theoretically the genetic component of fear of death should be similar for most more developed animals, simply because it's a genetic survival trait. Humans certainly have a vastly superior ability to express their feelings about it, and that, perhaps more unique, ability to carry knowledge between generations over centuries has left us with some rather extensive expressions and various more or less sane behaviour patterns. (How obvious would 'awareness of death' seem if we examined the first humans, without all that baggage?)

Still, many animals demonstrate rudimentary awareness of 'death' in situations when it strikes social relations or family, when they cause it themselves and when faced with some dangers causing death (as opposed to just causing pain), such as most not wandering randomly off cliffs, into water, avoiding predators and poisonous dangers, etc.

If we raised a group of free-range homo sapiens in a similar way to cattle, how would awareness of death express itself?

Personally, I suspect that most animals have much more self-awareness than we generally like to pretend. That we like to ignore it isn't strange, considering most humans can reject even human emotional and cognitive similarities if they're 'the enemy' in war, and so.

I'm not going to turn vegan or so, but neither am I going to kid myself. And I would prefer vat-grown and/or other variants of brainless meat, if available. But painless meat still wouldn't make much of an ethical difference; animals shouldn't be handled in such a way that they would experience significant pain, whether they can feel it or not.

Re:Brainless!

[xappax]

Animals already endure all kinds of sores, infections and other wounds as a result of factory farm conditions. The fact that they feel pain doesn't allow them to prevent their injuries, though. Pain is only useful if you have the power to do something in response to it, and factory farm animals have no power at all. Everyone knows if you want to "ensure quality", you get meat locally grown on a small farm that doesn't use hormones or antibiotics. You want festering, stressed, infection-ravaged meat pumped full of chemicals, head down to the supermarket.

Re:Brainless!

[Ian Alexander]

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.

Re:Brainless!

[thrash242]

The current common modern method of slaughter is already pretty painless, I think. They use a pneumatic air gun that drives a captive metal rod very hard on their head, knocking them out or killing them instantly and then their throats are slit so they bleed out while unconscious. The method was designed to be humane and painless. The animals behind are prevented from seeing the act and causing them distress, also.

Major exceptions are ritual slaughter methods used in Islam and some other religions. In the aforementioned religion's ritual slaughter method, animals just have their throats slit while fully conscious (there is also chanting or something involved).

Re:Brainless!

[Vintermann]

"I am pretty sure they're able to be dissatisfied with living their entire lives in an overcrowded box doing nothing but gaining weight."

Animals are certainly capable of that - if they were Gazelles, they would be dead. But they're cows... that they can sort of deal with such conditions is part of why we domesticated them in the first place, as opposed to, say, those Gazelles.
And I don't know if an animal would be unhappy about gaining weight. Why should they? A reliable food supply is n.1 on most animal's priority list, and even a cat would gladly eat to obesity if given the chance.

Not that I'm against animal welfare, mind you, but I think part of respecting animals is realizing they aren't all that interested in climbing Maslow's pyramid all the way to the top.

Re:Brainless!

[Ian Alexander]

That's a very good point, but there are also other things you can do. There are many farms across the country that still operate on a sustainable basis that treat their animals more humanely than in industrial CAFOs. Their meat tends to taste better anyways because the animals are generally getting the food they actually need- cows and chickens are actually getting grass instead of corn- so it actually tastes like how that animal should taste. If you can support those local farmers, you can grow the market for that kind of meat. There probably won't ever be large companies doing sustainable, humane, meat production, but if enough little guys get into the business again who needs large companies?

Though, of course, there are more ecological benefits to quitting meat. Meat is way more resource-intensive to produce than plants.

Re:Brainless!

[Atario]

Sounds like the solution is to engineer the ability to grow slabs of pure standalone muscle. No pain, no consciousness -- no animal at all; just tissue.

Re:Double no

[swanzilla]

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.

This will only help cruelty

[SuperBanana]

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.

Re:What is this doing under idle?

[whatajoke]

Interesting article. Thanks. But I think the problems noted with CIPA(Congenital insensitivity to pain) are solveable at least for creating special ops soldiers. Preserve and keep healthy the human units with CIPA until a mission really requires them. And then you send them into circumstances not even a strong willed human can tolerate (e.g. radioactive battlescape). May not be possible with most (modern) democratic countries, but can become a possibility under extrenuating changes. And discoveries can be used even decades after they are made.

I've heard this somewhere before...

[Minwee]

'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.'

Exactly!

[commodoresloat]

Don't these idiots know that the suffering is where all the good flavor is?

Re:Exactly!

[Red Flayer]

Don't these idiots know that the suffering is where all the good flavor is?

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.

Re:Exactly!

[ari_j]

Not just that, but a cow who can't feel pain also won't moo when there is a pain-causing stimulus that is harming the animal. Whether it's a disease, a broken bone, a pregnancy gone wrong, or anything else, the rancher won't have cause to suspect his cow is in trouble and you will end up with diseased, bruised meat, deadly miscarriages, and other problems. It's crueler than pain.

Disclaimer: I do not believe cows suffer unduly as a general rule, and I do not believe that refusing to eat beef on ethical grounds is anything short of dumb. Add a willingness to eat fish despite the ethical objection to beef, and you're a complete hypocrite (fish are suffocated to death, while livestock are usually killed fairly painlessly). Bring on the surf and turf!

Re:Exactly!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Exactly!

[raddan]

Yeah but fish are ugly.

Re:Exactly!

[mpoulton]

Disclaimer: I do not believe cows suffer unduly as a general rule, and I do not believe that refusing to eat beef on ethical grounds is anything short of dumb. Add a willingness to eat fish despite the ethical objection to beef, and you're a complete hypocrite (fish are suffocated to death, while livestock are usually killed fairly painlessly). Bring on the surf and turf!

I eat fish and avoid beef on ethical grounds. I'm not dumb, or hypocritical. Every morality-based lifestyle choice operates only within certain limits, and the extent of those limits is a manifestation of the degree of importance the individual places on the underlying moral issue. The issue at hand is also not nearly as simple as you claim it to be. My primary concern is not the last five minutes of my food's life, it's everything that happens beforehand. Wild-caught fish live in a completely natural state until they are caught. While many bad things may happen to those fish in nature, humans don't cause those problems! Fish also lack the same type and degree of pain sensation that mammals have (though some studies indicate that they perceive something pain-like). Cows, on the other hand, exist only at the will of their owners, and any suffering they endure is entirely our fault. They process pain the same way humans do. I believe that, in general, livestock are not treated with the degree of care throughout their lives that is owed to a captive sentient being. Therefore, I eat fish and not beef. You may disagree with the value judgments inherent in this argument, and may dispute some of the uncertain facts regarding the nature of suffering and pain sensation (since these issues are legitimately subject to scientific debate), but that does not make my reasoning or my conclusion "dumb" or "hypocritical" any more than yours is.

Re:Exactly!

[timeOday]

IMHO the big fallacy here is assuming there is some fundamental distinction between living and nonliving things. It is all chemical processes, a swirling eddy in a larger flow of physical process that is the universe. Humans are for now the gold standard for "alive," a dog is "rather alive," fish are "somewhat alive," plants are "slightly alive," and fire is "arguably a little bit alive." The immorality of killing has to depend on how much life was snuffed out.

Re:sick

[nizo]

If your servers screamed every time you had to reboot them, would you so willingly install Microsoft software on them?

Re:Dmritard96

[Anonymous Coward]

While it would certainly be desirable to have the ability to "turn down" the pain, permanently attenuating it would be bad, because it decreases dynamic range, either distorting the scale of pain, or more likely causing some low-level pains (like sore muscles) to go completely unnoticed.

Fortunately, we do have the ability to temporarily reduce pain levels, and it's automatically triggered when needed -- adrenaline!

Re:Double no

[FCAdcock]

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.

Re:BDSM?

[Supurcell]

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!

Re:Double no

[idontgno]

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!

Re:Stupid

[avandesande]

Maybe you are thinking of veal pens.

There are all kinds of ways to farm cattle. Here in New Mexico they are allowed to graze on multi-thousand acre ranches.

Re:What is this doing under idle?

[Brian Gordon]

They're not bred to survive, they're bred to die.

I do see the philosophical ramifications though. Why force all these miserable fast food workers to slave away all day when we can make fast food workers that enjoy it? That kind of thing.

Re:And in future news...

[Archangel Michael]

Yeah, I think its somewhat ghoulish to find nourishment in the chard flesh and dead animals, but when you really think about 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.

Exactly. Suffering != Pain

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Can't they just lobotomize them?

[lwsimon]

Having worked on a dairy farm for years, and seeing that I have 8 hogs in my back yard, I'm going to call bullshit on this one. Dairy cattle are typically allowed to freely roam for most of the day. Their day goes like this:

Wake up in a large barn, with 400 or so other cows. Mosey out into a holding pen and stand there until let into the milk barn. Stand there and get milked. Blow snot on the person milking you. Crap all over the place, try to splatter on the person milking you. Walk out into a field. Stand around and chew on grass all day. Come back to the holding pen because your udder is full and uncomfortable. Stand there until let into the milk barn. Stand there and get milked. Blow snot on the person milking you. Crap all over the place, try to splatter on the person milking you. Walk out into a field. Chew on some grass. Go back to the barn and go to sleep.

Hog pens are messy, but that's not because they're mistreated - pigs can't effectively sweat, so they cover themselves with wet mud to help dissipate heat. I promise, they *prefer* it that way. The pens are usually about 10x10' per pig.

Re:unforseen consequences

[xs650]

"Do they go on a rampage?"

That would be a pain free sheep, a pain free cow would go on a bullpage.

Factory Farms

[MaryBethP]

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...

No more screaming while I feed...

[bodland]

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.

Re:What is this doing under idle?

[icebike]

Because its a solution looking for a problem.

Your average farm animal does not suffer much pain in its life. At least not since we stopped harnessing them for pulling plows.

Large animals, cattle, hogs, probably feel one brief instance of pain as the are slaughtered, but other than that modern
animal husbandry does not involve inflicting pain. Even the ear tags used on cows do not seem to bother them much.
Watching them punch those tags in, many animals don't even seem to notice.

Chickens and turkeys life in crowded areas, and occasionally stampede each other, but other than that they live
a boring but pain free existence.

This is a stupid idea. The animals would hurt themselves more with this than without it. The barbed wire fence would
rip grazing cattle to shreds if they couldn't feel it.

Re:What is this doing under idle?

[Rary]

How did I know you vegans would weigh in with your overwrought horror stories.

Unlike you, I've actually worked on a farm, so don't bring that nonsense around here.

Right, because we all know that the world's demand for meat is easily met by your little family farms, and that industrial factory farming is entirely a myth propagated by smelly hippie animal rights terrorists to further their agenda of enslaving meat-eating humans.

In the U.S., four companies produce 81 percent of cows, 73 percent of sheep, 57 percent of pigs and 50 percent of chickens. In 1967, there were one million pig farms in America; as of 2002, there were 114,000, with 80 million pigs (out of 95 million) killed each year on factory farms as of 2002, according to the U.S. National Pork Producers Council. According to the Worldwatch Institute, 74 percent of the world's poultry, 43 percent of beef, and 68 percent of eggs are produced this way.