the animal machine

The New York Times today ran this op-ed on changing the way farmed animals experience pain. By genetically engineering animals whose brains, while experiencing the sensation of pain, don't experience it as something altogether unpleasant, they are, in a way, numb: they become the animal machines that Descartes so foolishly claimed them to be. This purportedly would remove much of our guilt in perpetuating the awful methods we use in industrial farming. The piece concludes:

If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether, the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on them. It would be far better than doing nothing at all.

This is an interesting path to pursue, and it's hard to disagree with innovations that lessen the suffering of animals (which is my whole motivation for writing this blog, after all). I've thought about this before. If we can engineer animals that grow at unnatural rates, whose flesh we manipulate so that the majority of the animal is our preferred lean breast meat, then why not engineer animals that are almost entirely insensate, both physically and mentally? Since we have the technology to turn sensitive creatures into meat-making machines, why not take the last step and make them completely senseless? It is, after all, for their own good.

I think the barrier to pursuing this to its "rational" end is the fact that these animals must be heavily genetically modified. People are afraid of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), despite the fact that they consume them all the time without really noticing. Those chickens that are mostly lean breast meat? Do you think those happened naturally? I've done some research in the past on genetic modification, and came to the confident conclusion that tinkering with genes in a lab is, practically, no different than breeding turkeys to the point where they can no longer naturally reproduce (because of those big, lean, white-meat breasts). But where "natural" breeding is unquestioned, GMOs scare the pants off of us because it's new and because chimeras have always been objects of fascination and repulsion. We eat GMO corn and soybeans but talking about GM animals is too much for our delicate sensibilities to handle.

I have two reactions to this and I'm not sure which of them is "correct". Let's start with the practical one:

Get over it! If GMOs are scary because they're unnatural, what do you call confining a genetically fucked-up animal to a space where she can't move a step in any direction? What do you call chickens producing abnormally gigantic eggs in total darkness at a rate four times that of what their normal, non-modified cousins in the barnyard did? Animals who never inhabit the world they were evolved for, whose basic needs to bathe, stretch, forage, create community and care for their young are completely thwarted, who are fed diets of their ground-up compatriots and never touch the ground or breathe unfiltered air--is that natural? Oh hell no it isn't. If we've already messed with these genetics for our benefit, why not finish the job for their benefit? They live and die for our preferences and tastes; it's hard to deny them this one small thing simply because we're scared it might not be natural.

And then the ethically consistent response: These creatures aren't ours, we shouldn't have messed with them in the first place, so what right do we have to take away any opportunity for an actual life?

The thing that really bothers me, though, is this: at one point, the author (a neuroscience grad student) states:

We are most likely stuck with factory farms, given that they produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume.

This kind of thinking is not productive, nor is it healthy. We've overcome some awful habits in our past as humans. I believe this exact reasoning justified the perpetuation of slavery in the United States for a good fifty years past the rest of the Atlantic community. It's bad reasoning, it's lazy morality, and we can do better.