Every Dog Has Its Day

[John Bailey]

I would have agreed until recently. I've got nothing against genetic
engineering per se, and am positively pro-post-human when it comes to
arguments about the "unnaturalness" of all that stuff. We already lead
ridiculously "unnatural" lives and that's often a pretty good thing.

But when you realise that almost all commercially farmed animals are
stuffed to the gills with antibiotics, and that we're strongly
recommended not to consume too many antibiotics ourselves or it'll do
Very Bad Things to us, but that they're still there in every piece of
meat sold... and that cloned animals either die young or end up with
severe defects, and human bodies sometimes reject transplanted organs
for some reason... well, I wouldn't want to be the first one to
test-drive a lab-grown liver.

As for legless cows: farmed turkeys and chickens in the US can't walk.
They've already done it. They've also made them unable to sexually
reproduce.

On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 8:01 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, before you get too emotional about the possible-evil of legless
> cows, think about headless, or at least only core-brained cattle
> clones with no cognition, and thus no pain or agitation.  It's worth
> some consideration.
>
> It's not too different from the also real-projected future of
> vat-grown human replacement organs.  I mean, if you could grow human
> organs ethically, the same is probably true about beef or other animal
> meat.  I'm sure there are LOTS of reason to be cautious of this
> future, but the benefits of artificially grown human organs makes at
> least that side of the equation worth considering seriously.  And if
> the quality-control of organs grown for human-transplant is
> acheivable, then the same for human consumption should be that much
> easier.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 1:53 PM,  <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> I read somewhere about a plan to genetically engineer cows so that they're born without legs -- save money on fences, I guess.  That a human or group of humans could sit together and plan something so unspeakably vicious ... well, it's Evil in the extreme.  If there's any reality to karmic retribution, these people should suffer it a hundred-fold.
>
>