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.

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.

At last!

[FlyingSquidStudios]

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

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.

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:Kind of Creepy and Absurd

[ratnerstar]

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

Brainless!

[Smivs]

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

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.

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!

[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: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: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: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: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.