The New York Times ran an editorial in favor of genetically engineering animals to not feel pain. The author, a vegan named Adam Shriver, wrote:
We are most likely stuck with factory farms, given that they produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume. But it is still possible to reduce the animals’ discomfort — through neuroscience. Recent advances suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less.
This didn’t sit well with the majority of vegans, most of whom believe that everyone should go vegan and that’s that. Here’s a roundup of reactions on vegan blogs and message boards (surprisingly, I tried to find the most interesting quotes, not necessarily the most ridiculous):
Tyranny of the Prefrontal Cortex:
I agree with Shriver that unnecessary farm animal suffering is a grievous aspect of our modern world, and that much more needs to be done to alleviate it. But his proposal threatens an inner sanctum of nature which even we humans have not yet ventured to desecrate: a creature’s subjective sense of self. We’ve trained, tormented, killed and eaten other animals from time immemorial; but we’ve never genetically engineered a creature to be a zombie. Along with the powers brought to us by the discoveries of neuroscience and genetic engineering, we must establish a set of principles that incorporate a sense of what is sacred in the natural world… before we create a true Cartesian nightmare where all that’s left are we humans and our own artificially constructed environment, engineered for our consumption.
Desdemona: “This strikes me as the most soulless, evil (and that’s not a word I use often, or cavalierly) thing I’ve ever heard of. … I seriously don’t want to live in a world where something like this occurs.”
Bluntly, this type of thinking, which proposes breeding genetically engineered animals so that they march more willingly to the deaths, just to feed the American palette’s seemingly insatiable desire for blood and flesh, is but a subset of that ideology which places humanity on a pedestal above everything else in existence.
It’s interesting if only because it underscores something people seldom think about: it’s a monstrous situation that we feel pain and suffer in the first place. If you were designing an organism from the ground up, you’d have to be a moral idiot (or an amoral algorithm) to do it this way.
Animal Rights & AntiOppression:
I refuse to believe that this is what we’ve come to, that we are so selfish a society that when faced with the horrors, crises, and injustices of our own making, we would devote ourselves to finding out how we can continue rather than how we can stop — that we would do this, that we would go this far, before simply living our values, before making a far more logical change. Animal agriculture is unsustainable (a problem not addressed at all by Shriver’s plan) and cruel and unjust. But we don’t need nauseating, elaborate schemes such as Shriver’s so that we can continue it. We just need to stop it.
I can remember two separate occasions when I was on a painkiller such that I could feel pain but was so spaced out that the pain seemed OK somehow. One was having a wisdom tooth and one was a sigmoidoscopy (a nasty intestinal probe). The former was more like a drug trip where bad things are happening IRL but you go, “no, man, it’s all cool.” For the latter, I remember actually screaming with pain, but somehow my brain was separate from the guy on the table screaming and it seemed as if it was all right. Quite aside from the many other problems with this proposal, these extremely unpleasant experiences make me very unenthusiastic about engineering out that one neural pathway and leaving that other one.
Eliminating pain in farmed animals does not eliminate the horror of cutting a life short for a moment of gustatory pleasure. It does not address the rich, intricate social and emotional worlds of farmed animals. In fact, it further reduces them to simple, sensory beings who have no other moral worth than how much pain they feel. … The reality still remains - we do not need their flesh, milk or eggs to survive. We just do not. Let’s stop trying to make it easier on our conscience to kill these animals and start directing that into positive energy, into doing something good for them and us - choosing a plant-based diet.
Dear Linux: “Let’s engineer cows that don’t have eyes so they can’t see it coming.”
Philosophia and Animal Liberation:
Basically, rather than encourage a vegan diet, or at least one with less animal products, which would solve the animal factory farming problem, they want to engineer animals without certain abilities to feel pain, ignore the fact that suffering is based on far more than physical pain, and create animals who would make their consumers feel less guilty about consuming them, because they would be genetically engineered to “suffer” less.
Smasher: “Why not have an anesthesiologist on site before they’re skinned alive? As an added bonus, the drug residues would help numb the people who eat them!”
Once again, as with attempts to convince the public that animal farming could ever be humane, humans are desperate to provide alternatives to consuming animals that don’t include not consuming animals. …
I don’t think that people who are going to eat animals no matter what care what degree of pain the animals are feeling because they’re currently feeling more pain than any of us can imagine and those people are still eating them. …
If a person cares about what “livestock” experience on their way to becoming “meat,” there is one easy, inexpensive action that person can take to make certain s/he is not a party to the various kinds and levels of suffering and injustice the animals experience. That action is to opt out and go vegan.
megajoe: “Hey, I have a great idea to end human suffering. Let’s genetically modify people so they can’t feel physical pain!” rutabaga: “Perfect! Now we don’t need to worry about genocide anymore!”
