Engineering Animals to Feel No Pain So We Feel No Guilt

by Heidi Stevenson

23 February 2010

Most people seem to want to think of the animals they eat living lives something like the flying cow to the right—blissful, carefree, living life to the fullest—then suddenly, without awareness, painlessly dropping dead. No one wants to consider that the food on the dinner plate lived a life of suffering. In most cases, though, that's exactly what happens.

So, now a proposal is in place to genetically engineer feed animals so they don't feel pain. But who actually benefits? And who is the focus of such a concept?

A Digression Into Factory Farm Life

In modern agribusiness, nothing is done for anything other than the bottom line. What is now done to animals in the quest for bigger figures in the bottom line is the definition of evil.

Baby Cows

Baby cows are taken from their mothers within a few hours, crammed into tiny spaces so they can't even turn around with absolutely nothing to comfort them. They are chained at the neck so they can't even move a step forward or back. They're fed liquid food full of chemicals, which are necessary because they would otherwise die. These poor creatures, miserable, in pain both physical and psychic, and horrendously weakened from never being able to move around, are forced to walk to the trucks that take them to be slaughtered. If they're too weak, electric cattle prods are used to try to force them. If they still can't get to the truck, they're dragged by the neck or leg.

The reason there are so many baby calves mistreated so badly isn't just because there's a market for them. It's also because their mothers are dairy cattle, raised to give milk. Male calves cannot grow to give milk, so they're delegated to become veal. The mothers live on. Though the baby's life is cruel and short, it may be the more fortunate of the two. In factory farming, dairy cattle suffer grievously.

Mother Cows

From conception, there's no joy in a factory farmed cow. If she's lucky, she gets outside occasionally, but never to see grass. At most, she spends a small bit of time standing in dirt, mud, and excrement. Inside, she likely doesn't have adequate ventilation and is confined to a tiny space, and this social herd creature is separated from other cows. She suffers stress from isolation and inability to move around.

Conception is forced through artificial insemination. When her calf is born nine months later, it's taken away. As with any mother, the loss of her baby is a grievous experience. She is, of course, lactating. Since she's milked, she continues to produce, even though she's impregnated within three months of giving birth. She is literally kept lactating through her entire pregnancy, and she spends 3/4 of her life prenant.

But it gets worse. A cow's natural diet is grass. They're made to eat it. Their four stomachs are specialized to digest a high-fiber and nutrient-poor sustenance. It's produces perfect milk in the right quantity for a calf. But that's nowhere near as much milk as agribusiness wants to see. So, they feed cows a completely unnatural diet of low fiber, high nutrient grains, such as corn and soy, and fortified with animal products. These naturally herbivorous animals are forced to eat animal flesh—more accurately, byproducts of animals. Their natural digestive process is disrupted, causing great discomfort, and psychic trauma because the natural order of cud chewing is disrupted. But that's not the end of their misery.

Factory cows are forced to produce massively through rBGH, recombinant bovine growth hormone. Of course, they produce more milk as a result, an average of 100 pounds a day, 10 times more than a calf requires. Their udders are extremely stretched, and the weight must be extremely hard on their backs.

The rBGH causes a multitude of problems. They develop painful and chronic bacterial infections of the udders, which is treated with routine doses of antibiotics. Of course, this results in antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. Both rBGH and the antibiotics make their way into the milk that's sent to the supermarkets where people buy the stuff.

But that's not the end of the disease problem. Excessive amounts of IgF-1, insulin-like growth factor, are found in the milk that reaches stores. It causes cancer in humans.

The massive milk production requires more energy and nutrients than even the high-density stuff they're given. They're weakened from inadequate nutrition. The animals wear out. They suffer from loss of calcium, so their bones are prone to fracturing. Some simply collapse, becoming what factory farming euphemistically terms "downers".

The normal life expectancy of a cow is about 20 years. Factory cows liver only about three, possibly four, years. They are burned out, exhausted, and have lived lives of agony, misery, and disease.

That's a hint of the reality of factory farming.

Genetic Engineering to Keep Animals From Feeling Pain

An advocate of genetically engineering animals so they feel less pain, Adam Shriver gave a clinical description of what neuroscientists have recently accomplished. In the New York Times, he wrote:

Recently, scientists have learned to genetically engineer animals so that they lack certain proteins that are important to the operation of the anterior cingulate cortex. Prof. Min Zhuo and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, for example, have bred mice lacking enzymes that operate in affective pain pathways. When these mice encounter a painful stimulus, they withdraw their paws normally, but they do not become hypersensitive to a subsequent painful stimulus, as ordinary mice do.

Shrive is saying that they the mice don't feel as much pain, though they retain enough of the awareness to withdraw from pain, but not enough to try to avoid it. Because this part of the body is similar in all mammals, it's probable that the same effect can be produced in farm animals.

Ethics? Morality?

What are the ethics of such a possibility? Does it justify raising animals in such wretched circumstances? Is removing extreme physical pain enough to justify keeping them in unhealthy and psychicly miserable circumstances? Shriver sums his views on the subject like this:

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.

Aside from the fact that he's putting himself in the position of playing god, he's also presuming a great deal. He assumes that there's less pain, but we don't know that. Perhaps there is only the loss of ability to anticipate the painful experience.

Even if the physical pain is diminished, it does nothing for the psychic pain. For those more anthropomorphically based, it does nothing to decrease the corruption of the final "food" products that result from the factory farming process.

There is only one sure thing about the concept of genetic engineering to limit the sense of physical pain in factory-kept animals: The purpose has nothing to do with caring for the welfare of these wretched creatures. No one who does such things to living beings could possibly care that they're causing pain. The only purpose is marketing—to convince people that the animals don't suffer, to allow people to hold onto an image of a cow frolicking in a field or flying freely through the air, until the very last moment, when it suddenly and painlessly ends.

Can't you just see the supermarket ads?

"We sell only good conscience meat. You can buy beef again, secure in the knowledge that there was no suffering."

The attitude comes through loud and clear in Shriver's title for his piece advocating genetic engineering to limit animal's pain: "Not Grass-Fed, but at Least Pain-Free"