Pain-Free Animals Could Take Suffering Out of Farming

Philosopher Adam Shriver suggested that genetically engineering cows to feel no pain could be an acceptable alternative to eliminating factory farming in a paper published in Neuroscience. Work by neuroscientist Zhou-Feng Chen at Washington University may turn Shriver's suggestion a reality. Chen has been working on identifying the genes that control "affective" pain, the unpleasantness part of a painful sensation. He has managed to isolate a gene called P311, and has found that mice who do not have P311 don't have negative associations with pain, although they do react negatively to heat and pressure. This could end much of the concern about cruel farming practices, but unfortunately still leaves my design for the fiery hamburger punch in the unethical column.

Um, how about no?

[Millennium]

Pain serves a useful biological function: it allows living things to know when they have been injured.

Now, admittedly, cattle are not the brightest animals in the evolutionary tree. Nevertheless, they still know enough to stay away from things that hurt them. Removing the ability to do that can't possibly be good for their safety.

Re:Double no

[swanzilla]

I put myself through my undergrad and post grad work by working as a bouncer in a whisky drinking/fist fighting bar in Montana. I assure you that pain serves a very useful function. The average non-slashdotter tends to react to logical thought and formed arguments far less strongly as they will to something more basal such as an elbow to the nose.

Re:What is this doing under idle?

[whatajoke]

Interesting article. Thanks. But I think the problems noted with CIPA(Congenital insensitivity to pain) are solveable at least for creating special ops soldiers. Preserve and keep healthy the human units with CIPA until a mission really requires them. And then you send them into circumstances not even a strong willed human can tolerate (e.g. radioactive battlescape). May not be possible with most (modern) democratic countries, but can become a possibility under extrenuating changes. And discoveries can be used even decades after they are made.

Re:Brainless!

[Brian Gordon]

Why is he brainless? I'd feel a lot more comfortable eating meat that was "grown" like a vegetable than eating meat that's the body of a slaughtered animal. Brainless cows sound like a perfect solution. Given of course that it's even possible.

Re:Exactly!

[ari_j]

Not just that, but a cow who can't feel pain also won't moo when there is a pain-causing stimulus that is harming the animal. Whether it's a disease, a broken bone, a pregnancy gone wrong, or anything else, the rancher won't have cause to suspect his cow is in trouble and you will end up with diseased, bruised meat, deadly miscarriages, and other problems. It's crueler than pain.

Disclaimer: I do not believe cows suffer unduly as a general rule, and I do not believe that refusing to eat beef on ethical grounds is anything short of dumb. Add a willingness to eat fish despite the ethical objection to beef, and you're a complete hypocrite (fish are suffocated to death, while livestock are usually killed fairly painlessly). Bring on the surf and turf!

Re:Brainless!

[xappax]

As you hinted at, the killing may or may not be painless, it's the part before the killing that's obviously cruel. Part of that is because it's physically painful to be packed in so tightly you can't move, covered in infections, etc. However being an animal in a factory farm is probably also terrifying on a more abstract level, even if you can't feel physical pain. That's a lot more difficult to change without restructuring the whole way the meat industry operates. Until such a restructuring happens, I'm not buying what they're selling.

Re:Brainless!

[Znork]

Cows really aren't aware there going to die

Do you know if there is/have any links to any concrete evidence for that besides the obvious feelgood factor?

Theoretically the genetic component of fear of death should be similar for most more developed animals, simply because it's a genetic survival trait. Humans certainly have a vastly superior ability to express their feelings about it, and that, perhaps more unique, ability to carry knowledge between generations over centuries has left us with some rather extensive expressions and various more or less sane behaviour patterns. (How obvious would 'awareness of death' seem if we examined the first humans, without all that baggage?)

Still, many animals demonstrate rudimentary awareness of 'death' in situations when it strikes social relations or family, when they cause it themselves and when faced with some dangers causing death (as opposed to just causing pain), such as most not wandering randomly off cliffs, into water, avoiding predators and poisonous dangers, etc.

If we raised a group of free-range homo sapiens in a similar way to cattle, how would awareness of death express itself?

Personally, I suspect that most animals have much more self-awareness than we generally like to pretend. That we like to ignore it isn't strange, considering most humans can reject even human emotional and cognitive similarities if they're 'the enemy' in war, and so.

I'm not going to turn vegan or so, but neither am I going to kid myself. And I would prefer vat-grown and/or other variants of brainless meat, if available. But painless meat still wouldn't make much of an ethical difference; animals shouldn't be handled in such a way that they would experience significant pain, whether they can feel it or not.

Re:Brainless!

[xappax]

Animals already endure all kinds of sores, infections and other wounds as a result of factory farm conditions. The fact that they feel pain doesn't allow them to prevent their injuries, though. Pain is only useful if you have the power to do something in response to it, and factory farm animals have no power at all. Everyone knows if you want to "ensure quality", you get meat locally grown on a small farm that doesn't use hormones or antibiotics. You want festering, stressed, infection-ravaged meat pumped full of chemicals, head down to the supermarket.

Re:Brainless!

[thrash242]

The current common modern method of slaughter is already pretty painless, I think. They use a pneumatic air gun that drives a captive metal rod very hard on their head, knocking them out or killing them instantly and then their throats are slit so they bleed out while unconscious. The method was designed to be humane and painless. The animals behind are prevented from seeing the act and causing them distress, also.

Major exceptions are ritual slaughter methods used in Islam and some other religions. In the aforementioned religion's ritual slaughter method, animals just have their throats slit while fully conscious (there is also chanting or something involved).

Re:Brainless!

[Vintermann]

"I am pretty sure they're able to be dissatisfied with living their entire lives in an overcrowded box doing nothing but gaining weight."

Animals are certainly capable of that - if they were Gazelles, they would be dead. But they're cows... that they can sort of deal with such conditions is part of why we domesticated them in the first place, as opposed to, say, those Gazelles.
And I don't know if an animal would be unhappy about gaining weight. Why should they? A reliable food supply is n.1 on most animal's priority list, and even a cat would gladly eat to obesity if given the chance.

Not that I'm against animal welfare, mind you, but I think part of respecting animals is realizing they aren't all that interested in climbing Maslow's pyramid [wikipedia.org] all the way to the top.