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Notes -
Lab-grown meat one step closer to sale in the US
I'm neither a vegetarian nor an EA animal suffering activist, but I consider this largely a good thing. If we can produce lab-grown meat that costs the same or less than traditionally-raised or industrial-produced meat and is equally tasty and nutritious, I see very little reason not to do so. I've tried the various meat substitutes and, frankly, they just don't taste like meat or have the same texture. This isn't to say they aren't tasty in their own way, they just clearly aren't meat. The best ones I've had barely rise to the level of "gas station sausage patty" in terms of flavor and texture. Likewise cutting down on cattle ranching in the US would alleviate a lot of environmental pressure and gives us the opportunity to rebuild healthy habitat for native wildlife populations.
What does give me pause is the further connotative removal of people from food production. A farmer I know has an anecdote about a well-to-do customer who pulled up to his farm stand to buy some produce and was appalled to find potatoes sitting in a pile on a pallet. The farmer swears the customer, without any trace of irony, asked for "potatoes that hadn't been in the dirt". I'm hunt deer and small game and the bulk of my urbanite coworkers normally react to this somewhere on the spectrum between bafflement and outright disgust, all the while munching on ham-and-cheese sandwiches or a fish taco. (I work in a pretty blue area, so that's probably coloring things.) I can see scenarios in which PETA and other animal suffering activist organizations use lab grown meat as an attack surface to further restrict hunting and fishing activities.
All but guaranteed in the current political climate.
Animal welfare hasn't yet taken off as the new frontier in social justice, but once whatever the current thing is passes from mainstream appeal, they'll find a new one.
Indeed, I'll place a marker down, even though I don't ever expect to be called on it: I'd rate it at 90% chance that some U.S. state, likely Cali but could be somewhere else, actually bans consumption of at least one form of commonly consumed animal meat, likely pork but could be something else, inside the next 5 years.
Here's your reminder that Cali is already stepping in that direction:
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2022/10/11/us-supreme-court-pork-law-more-space-pigs-california-pregnant-sows/69555929007/
Money will be dumped into this tech as well, and the more boondoggleish the tech is the more money can be grifted, so that just makes it more likely to get massive funding.
Torturing pigs marginally less is a step in the direction of banning pork entirely? It's interesting that you see these as steps on a continuum. It's almost as if maximal animal cruelty (so long as it doesn't eat into the profit margin) is necessary to signal opposition to banning meat entirely.
Yes?
Its the acknowledgment that the pigs have a cognizable legal interest in not suffering (which you can believe or not believe), that can supercede the farmers' interest in making a livelihood or humans, more generally, in eating said pigs.
Of course, we have tons of anti-animal cruelty laws on the books either way. So we already look at humans intentionally harming animals for no good reason as a criminal act.
But I don't know if you've noticed that the way these sorts of matters work is that there's a gradual shift in the legal tide which then ramps into a catalyst for rapid, immediate changes.
Such as, e.g., the abolition of slavery or the advancement of female suffrage. Or more recently, the recognition of same-sex marriage. Gradually, then all at once.
I'd argue that one only needs to signal indifference to animal cruelty in the context of farming them for food. I.e. the reasoning simply needs to be "We're going to kill them and eat them anyway, there's very little point to considering their feelings on the matter." This need not be an endorsement of maximizing the suffering or taking joy from it.
Plus, for the record, if we could engineer 'brain dead' animals that could carry out all the activities necessary to grow to full size for slaughter but were incapable of feeling any pain or pleasure, I would find this a perfectly acceptable solution as well. I don't want animals to suffer.
It's an interesting idea, but it wouldn't work. In effect, it would mean that the animal has leprosy. Humans who have leprosy (aka Hansen's disease) need to actively and consciously monitor themselves for any physical damage, because it's their inability to feel pain that leads small wounds to fester. (And they get wounds easier in the first place because the pain feedback isn't there.)
So a baby calf with something like leprosy will quickly hurt itself and get festering wounds.
That means that for this enterprise to be at all viable, you'd need to keep that calf isolated and in clean environment, and still check it over like every day for sores or cuts. That's a lot of work, and therefore not economically worth it.
Speaking of leprosy, see this recent article about using the bacteria that cause leprosy to (potentially) rejuvenate livers and so do away with the need for transplants.
Biology is strange and we still don't know the half of it. The same organism that causes a horrific disease may help cure a different illness.
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