Pain-free Farm Animals?

Sometimes, the mind boggles at the lengths to which factory farm apologists will go to defend their practices. Take, for example, an editorial by Washington University doctoral student Adam Shriver in last Thursday's New York Times. In his op-ed, Shriver advances the "gee-whiz" new innovation in preserving the factory farm status quo -- animals that don't feel pain. Shriver presents this as the pinnacle of scientific achievment, an ethical solution to an unavoidable fact of life. Truth is, this isn't ethical, and the problem is anything but unavoidable.

Here's more or less how it works. Scientists have figured out (or at least, they think they've figured out) exactly which parts of the brain to zap in order to make mice find pain to be less unpleasant. Essentially, they'll still feel pain, they just won't mind it so much. As Shriver puts it, "...these mice are normally sensitive to heat and mechanical pain, but they do not avoid situations where they experience such pain." Shriver also points out that, most mammals being neurologically fairly similar, it's possible that science can engineer cows and pigs along the same lines.

Count me out. In order to give Shriver's position any credibility, you've got to first come to grips with a few things. First among these is his assertion that, "[w]e are most likely stuck with factory farms." That's a premise I refuse to accept, and I imagine that hundreds of thousands of people working to bring about more humane methods of agriculture would agree with me. The fact is, we're going to be stuck with factory farming for exactly as long as a majority of consumers find it acceptable, and that majority is shrinking every day.

The second premise you have to accept is that suffering equals pain. It doesn't. Even if you think it's ethical (more on this in a second) to engineer animals so that they don't feel pain, you still haven't eliminated the suffering that comes from spending an entire lifetime being kept in a cage too small to turn around in, being force-fed, and having gallons of antibiotics pumped into you just to keep you alive. Not all suffering comes with a cut or bruise.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you have to accept the premise that this is somehow ethical. To me, and many others, there's no gray area; this is not ethical. It's nothing more than a cheap and easy way for people to assuage their consciences, and a cop-out for factory farm operators to keep practicing business as usual. As much as some in the scientific community might like to avoid it, animals are sentient creatures. They think, they reason, they feel, and they suffer. Engineering animals not to avoid pain is not ethical, it's just exploitative.

Photo credit: Smoobs