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08/15/2005: "Braindead cattle, mindless sheep"
Most people say it's bacon, but for me it's steak pie.
Just as autumn starts to tease with that first chill hint of winter, when you know a sandwich'n'salad lunch just isn't going to cut it anymore, the wicked sirens of the College Club seduce me with great sheets of pastry afloat on a sea of sumptuous bovine brown. And I am lost, lost in my lust for carrion flesh, ethics overpowered again by aesthetics.
Hi, let me introduce myself. I am, officially, the Crappest Vegetarian in All Christendom. This year, I fell off the wagon on an overseas work trip, with a modicum of justification - it is not-quite-but-almost true that the Romanian word for vegeterian translates as 'hungry'. But that was months ago, & - like the lapsed ex-smoker - I've been finding all manner of spurious excuses to avoid clambering back on again (it's my birthday/ I don't want to seem ungrateful to my hosts/ what the hell, it's dead already, etc., etc.)
My opposition to meat-eating is partly health-oriented (we all gotta die of something, but the family history of early demise through heart disease/strokes is rather difficult to ignore), but at least in substantial part, ethical. I know it isn't fashionable to say it, but I regard most meat-eating as morally dubious, and that most assuredly includes my own.
Not because of any Disney-fied anthropomorphic love for fluffy bunnies or doe-eyed, erm, does. For reasons I will probably explain later, I don't have a problem with killing most living things for food. My problem lies in part with the inefficiency of the carnivore lifestyle - in a world where millions starve, it's just madness to filter our grain supplies through a machine as inefficient as a cow - but also in part with the suffering imposed on animals by most modern farming techniques.
No, I don't mind killing a chicken or a duck in the interests of a good dinner, but I bloody well object to torturing them first. And as we all know, that's the horrible reality that lies behind our meat.
But what if there was another way, a humane alternative that would give me the tasty food without inflicting wretched misery on sentient beings? There are two obvious ways to do this, and so far we have tried only one: eliminating the cruelty from farming. The Farm Animals Welfare Council have made some suggestions as to how this side of things could be improved, and the dear old RSPCA's Freedom Food monitoring service allows us to avoid the worst of corporate farming nastiness.
But what about the other option; what about, instead of reducing the level of pain & suffering in the process, we instead reduced - or eliminated altogether - the capacity for food animals to experience pain and fear?
This might sound ridiculous, the sort of fantasy dreamt up by Douglas Adams, whose Restaurant at the End of the Universe offered a cow that wanted to be eaten. But an article from Saturday's Guardian suggests otherwise: 'Researchers', we are told, 'have published details in a biotechnology journal describing a new technique which they hailed as the answer to the world's food shortage. Lumps of meat would be cultured in laboratory vats rather than carved from livestock reared on a farm.'
Biologists, vet. scientists, philosophers and, indeed, government quangos have been mulling this one over for decades. Certainly, academics have taken the suggestion seriously. ‘If you create a sheep with the cognitive capacities of a prawn,' Bristol Uni's Prof. John Webster has asked, 'would it be a bad thing?’, while Nottingham Uni's Special Professor in Applied Bioethics, Ben Mepham , has speculated that 'In the limit, it might be technically possible to produce "animal vegetables", highly prolific and oblivious to their physical or mentalstatus.'
What is interesting is the reaction that the prospect of specially engineered non-sentient animals has tended to provoke. Mepham followed that suggestion with the immediate caveat that 'This is an important reason for not reducing all ethical concerns relating to animals to welfare concerns.' And in 1995, the Banner Committee (or the Report of the Ctte to Consider the Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies in the Breeding of Farm Animals, to give it its posh Sunday name) rejected the suggestion out of hand, asserting that ‘Even if this has no welfare implications ... the proposed modification is morally objectionable in treating the animals as raw materials …’ (Para. 3.19)
The question that immediately occurs to this wannabe carnivore is: why? If the principal ethical no-no about meat-eating lies in the suffering it inflicts, then creating meat beasties that can't suffer seems to offer the best of both worlds. Of course, if we were all carving slices off something akin to Pohl & Kornbluth's Chicken Little, this would almost certainly mean a reduction in the number of sentient animals born every year. But then, so would a wholesale conversion to vegeterianism. Personally, I regard my obligations as beginning and ending with the actual interests of sentient beings; I certainly have no duty to create more of them.
The Banner Ctte. regarded such modification as 'treating the animals as raw materials'; but doesn't this stand as an objection to farming as a whole? Isn't that the raison d'etre of the entire enterprise? If you're happy to allow everything from the choice of gamate donors to the slaughter of the animal to be conducted toward the end of gastronomic appeal and profit margin, there's a whiff of hypocrasy about coming over all Kantian as soon as genetic technology enters the equation.
Brainless bacon? Asentient sausages? Bring it on!
