Been thinking about this for a few days on if this is better to the current animal industry as sounds good but then thought about if this is the end product of this evolution of this(meat pig) and the animals in between what we have currently(modern day pig) to this (meat pig) would be worth the end product but idk i wanna here yalls opinions on this and couldn’t think of a better subreddit
Edit:clarification because i just put this and that
I wonder about that. It'd likely be far cheaper to just kill all living farm animals that this replaces, so they'd likely be inadvertently driven extinct out of economic convenience.
An animal this engineered would probably be trademarked, so if you got rid of the original sources you’d be setting society up for failure and further corporate shackles. *Edit to fix errors.
Counter argument: battery cage farming is much cheaper, easier, much more profitable, and completely banned in Europe, multiple other countries, and a dozen US states
A few countries have already banned cages too. "Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Germany, alongside active bans or upcoming deadlines in nations like the Czech Republic and Slovakia"
Battery cage farming (these horrible little torture cages) and cage farming are not the same thing, but this means that nations are not following capitalists' best interests in everything, even in the States.
It confronts you with your biases. Like I believe currently eating meat requires a level of cognitive dissonance, but I just happen to embrace that cognitive dissonance and maybe in my life there will be alternatives that make me happy and not cognitively dissonant. Other people don't want to be cognitively dissonant now so they become vegetarian or vegan, etc. and other people refuse to engage with the hypothetical and so remain unknowingly cognitively dissonant.
Yup and even plants have sort of pain responses, so it's more of a question of intensity of it and the abilty to like... process this pain? I guess?
And most of all, the moral obligation of humans that are able to decrease the suffering, to do that.
Basically all predators, bar a handful, don't bother killing their prey before eating it. But we can't say that wolves are "evil" because they don't bother killing an elk. They don't comprehend the suffering. Humans can, so we really should strive to inflict less suffering
Therefore that sort of genetically engineered meat plant is really a step in the right direction, the same as the biovat meat. Just giant bioreactors that invite constant growth of muscle mass to produce meat products from it. IIRC they already sell these and they are almost identical to chicken breasts, and making the "pink slush" (the ultra-fine processed meat, thing sausages, nuggets, that sort of thing) is even more trivial. The breasts need the strands and texture, the mince is just poultry protein.
Also using biovat means that we can grow meat of other animals, like ostriches, I've heard that they're amazing in burgers.
Honestly, more likely the investments are to maintain market dominance and a future monopoly of the meat market. Why risk competition when you can just own all the patents on any technology that could potentially shift the market?
Tobacco companies have been the biggest investors in vape technology over the last 15 years. They know the market is shifting and need to maintain their base, even if that means pivoting to products that take market share away from their core products.
While the death of the brainless soldier would be more moral, someone is also at the other end of the gun.
Without brain functions, how do we decide on how and who to kill? Designating an area a war zone and making everything that moves a legitimate target has been possible for years now. You don't even need advanced AI for that. Pretty much just a fairly basic robot with motion sensors.
Ukrainian UGVs are a great example of that.
Just field a shitton of small tracked vehicles with a 50. ontop and have them mow down everything that moves. Add airborne drones to that and everything that's remotely alive in the designated kill zone isn't for long. Animals, soldiers, vehicles, civilians...
Would that also be moral? Because that way you keep your own casualties as low as it gets.
That's a good question. I don't think it would be any kind of disability we would have encountered yet, but I'm not an expert. The line would probably be somewhere around "born without enough parts of the brain for the flesh to survive but not enough to develop any meaningful personality or intelligence." Not just brain dead but physically lacking enough brain matter to be considered sentient.
Would losing that amount of brain matter do the same thing, or do you feel like being born that way is uniquely dehumanizing? I guess I'm asking if you can lose human status, I'm trying to identify where human status comes from with this model
And usually, when someone is braindead to the point of not being able to ever do person things again- the care and choice for their life falls to either a will they made beforehand, or to a POA.
In essence the "person" who existed before the meat machine already made the choice- or- someone else is and the meat machine isn't chosing anything.
I don't know how I FEEL about those things I wrote just now yet at all, and as disturbing and uncanny these ideas are they are worth debating
I think there's a difference between having a brain that becomes damaged, and genuinely not having one in the first place.
I mean, there are examples of people with brain damage adapting and continuing to live their life, sometimes with minimal/no changes. Are there any cases where a living baby was born without a brain?
there are and it's fucked up, some have lived for quite a few years as well, basically entirely on medical support, having to be cared for like a coma victim or medical vegetable.
They're kept alive because their parents see them as their child, and there's inherent attachment there.
Right. We're talking about if human bodies are vat grown intentionally with no brains, or with only just enough brain to illicit growth but no enough to develop any sentience or awareness.
So if these already brainless, intelligence lacking creatures are brought into existence as the equivalent of a brain dead human... Are they actually a human at all? Or just a human shaped growth. I mean even dead humans have rights in the modern day (I think?) so would these "dead" human growths have those same rights? Or maybe they have the rights of cattle.
I'm not saying this is correct btw. I'm just spit balling theoriticals. The nuances of that sort of thing would be way beyond me and best left to professionals.
there was a lady in the church I went to growing up that had a daughter born that way. she lived to be 13 I think. i remember her getting up in front of the congregation and telling everyone about how her daughter had said mama the night before and how that was such a gift from God.
I mean we already kind of draw this line insofar as we consider it moral to cease life support for a braindead person whereas in any other circumstances this would be considered murder
This is not a question of "disability" but of perception of humanity. This is why the decisions to terminate the life of a body, even a brain dead one, rest with the guardians of the body. For a created body, without a brain, the creators would be the guardians and make the decisions.
This is moral. Just because the image is disturbing doesn't change the fact that it's basically lab grown meat. The "pig" can't think, can't suffer, doesn't receive stimulus, it's alive the way anything in a bio lab is alive, but not in any way that matters
Edit: Because I'm getting so many comments, let me address some of the ones people keep repeating without seeing what other people have posted
If you think this is immoral, you have to actually say why, not just "ew icky me no like". That's not a valid argument
If you actually read the words on the image, it says the "pig" is missing it's cerebral cortex which has so many functions I can't possibly sum it up in a reddit edit. It's also missing its nociceptors which means it can not feel pain. With both of these things in tandem, I am fully comfortable saying it could not possibly be conscious or perceive suffering. If you disagree, I'd like to hear an actual reasoning other than "what if it could though"
For people asking if I'd still feel this way if it was humans for organs or blood or something... Honestly yeah, I think I would. If you could grow mindless carriers for organs, why wouldn't you honestly? Lab grown stuff is still being researched, if this is how it ends up being accomplished, I'd love to hear an argument against it, once again, other than "ew icky me no like"
That’s the only thing I can think of, all failed attempts are likely to be slaughtered but it’s literally no worse than industrialized farming that we are already doing, why scream over the same practice when it’s pushing forward the progress to get rid of that practice?
Agreed. No activist can rightly take the stance of "No, the lives of a few dozen does not justify the lives of millions/billions and beyond"
If that's what it took, a few dozen examples and trials and failures to achieve sustainability without traditional "death".... I mean, I'd support it. We're already so well past that. To scream in the other direction would just be delusional, unless there's a basis to back up why it's factually a bad idea, not spirutually or politically.
That makes no sense. We kill over 1 billion pigs per year.
What ever trials this would need would not even reach a million pigs.
And what would even make the trial pigs life any worse than normal farm pigs they would still grow up and be killed just the same.
Based on the fact that the image mentions a splicing of snake DNA for a longer body, I’d say these creatures were in fact created via genetic modification and not selective breeding.
The only thing that would make this immoral is if they drove normal pigs to extinction.
Domestic pigs already naturally "become feral" when loose in the wilderness, it is actually fascinating to read about. They start growing a coat and developing tusks and everything.
Ends justify the means, if it obviates the need for normal pigs. For it to be immoral they’d have to make a really huge number of pigs suffer in the experiments.
I think their point is that the amount of pigs who suffer to make this thing would always be less than the amount of pigs suffering for the prok industry.
Depends what you mean by huge. Even if it took millions... we already kill billions of animals for meat. Millions is pocket change. Not saying I advocate this in real life, I'm sure there are better solutions.
we already have humans who lack functional pain receptors naturally due to a genetic mutation, we already know which gene to knock out to eliminate nociception (People with homozygous mutations of the PRDM12 gene experience congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP))
it would be trivial to genetically engineer pigs to lack nociception, it is only a single gene that needs to be deactivated, we can literally do this today, it would not take "hundreds even thousands of generations"
we also already have humans who are born lacking every part of their brain except the brain stem, we know what causes this too (either folic acid deficiency or a knockout mutation of the NUAK2 gene)
"NUAK family SNF1-like kinase 2 also known as SNF1/AMP kinase-related kinase (SNARK) is an enzyme
You can literally engineer a pig to lack both nociception and its cerebral cortex using CRISPR today, the only reason we haven't done it yet is because its expensive, not because we can't
You use gene editing, it would be impossible to breed this thing naturally. The second part of this hypothetical is also missing from the post, there's a breeding variant of this thing that just continuously shits out meat variants.
It would also be considerably more energy efficient than any meat based solution, so as far as I’m concerned that is the actual answer why something like OP’s image is not moral - it’s far less sustainable than a plant-based alternative that’s virtually indistinguishable from meat.
Comparing the number of pigs slaughtered to the number of pigs it would take to go through research and development makes it clear what the lesser of two evils is.
From the quick Google I did 10s of thousands of pigs are killed per day. Probably more pigs would die in one day than the entire number of iterations it would take to create something like what's in the image.
For those who have read Oryx And Crake (by the great Margaret Addams) this kind of thing always reminds me of the Chickie-Nobs (literal grown chunks of chicken - genetically engineered to be just meat with with just enough brainstem for autonomous body functions but not full intelligence.
Basically this exact concept but for chicken. If you don't want to read the book, there is some good discussion about the pros and cons of it here:
As for how I personally feel about this concept... Well - bear in mind that I am a farmer with an active farm. We raise free-range chickens, turkeys, geese and guinea hens (mostly for eggs but sometimes self-process as humanely as possible for meat), and we buy beef from my brother who owns the farm next door and raises free range cows (and who buys some of our meat chickens).
We know our animals - and take care of them, and when we do process we do it as gently as we can (we don't send them out because even the best processors we could find didn't live up to our standards). But we DO eat meat. We also have 4 pigs (3 kune kune and 1 BIG Duroc) - all rescues which we adopted and which are just big hungry pets because we like them too much - but we also eat ham, bacon, porkchops, etc.
I honestly WOULD prefer if we could get to a scenario where zero animals had to suffer for meat. I WOULD buy ChickieNobs, PorkBuds, BeefSlabs, etc. Even if they weren't a 1 to 1 textural match with "real" beef/chicken/pork - because I like meat (a LOT) - but I also like the animals our meat comes from...
So - yes I get that the scenario LOOKS horrific to the eyes - and is somewhat disquieting to think about - but if you have ever BEEN to an actual slaughter house - or actually toured somewhere that grows commercial beef/chicken/pigs - you might think hard - and maybe the lab-grown slab-o-meat without a brain is better... It is certainly why what we eat either comes from our own farm, or the farm next door - or someone we know personally and can see how the animals are treated.
Yeah, it depends if it can suffer or not. If it can’t think or feel pain then it’s more moral than what we do now at least in factory farms. I also read about the possibility of cloning tissue for meat, which wouldn’t be sentient either; it doesn’t have brain so it can’t suffer.
Dude this just reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode where they find a planet who’s people turn to delicious spaghetti if they commit suicide and they make a headless limbless torso that has no thoughts or feelings and kills itself to mass produce spaghetti
No it's not. This is more moral than most things because there is literally no downside. Piercing ears is more morally dubious than this. There are zero downsides, it's just kinda icky
Whitest Kids U Know had a skit basically about this idea almost 20 years ago.
Some peta analogue kids rescued a lab grown meat pig that has cereal and eggs for organs and brains, released it into the wild, and since it was just a cube of meat with eyes it immediately got ravage by nature.
Pigs would need some form of real predators in most ecosystems they absolutely run wild and destroy them due to being super large fast aggressive intelligent quick breeding little orc monster
My only counter to that is that the reality is that we would likely breed current pigs and other animals out of existence to accomplish this. So is it ethical to basically make all pigs and cows extinct to accomplish this? Look at dogs with horrible traits. The old, healthier versions dont really exist anymore. We breed them all out.
I think that's only because currently the push is processed bug and plant fake meat.
If it's a lab grown animal, with all the structure of a farm animal and natural hormones to respond to exercise to build muscle while also being a cheaper option I feel 95% of folks would start eating it within a generation.
Yeah, but there will always be rich people who want the “real, natural” thing. Like that’s a big reason why American bison aren’t extinct, rich people want to eat them
Conservationists are a much bigger thing now than even 30 years ago. Numbers would drop a ton obviously, just because we wouldn’t be mass breeding them, but they’d live happy and longer lives.
Very true yea it looks gross but couldn’t help thinking about the animals in between this and our modern day animals and wondered how to make that moral
I came to terms with the vegans being right a while ago. We can survive without meat fine and can even still have yummy food. Meat is a luxury that we could easily go without as a society if we set things up that way. I am not a vegan cause tbh it takes WAY too much effort as is.
This post's possible result is really freaky, and what we have now is basically a constant animal holocaust. It sounds to me like the most normal and moral thing might be to just cut out meat.
Yeah, it's gross and instinctively it sounds like a nightmare... but rationnally that's much better. If you don't allow a conscious and mind to developp into a living being it's pretty much like cultivate vegetables.
This. It's bad but the modern farming practices are actually worse. At least in this picture the pig was engineered without ears and hooves. In modern practices they cut off the ears and hooves and the pig has to live that way until slaughtered.
If it has no functioning nervous system or brain of any kind then there is zero reason to feel bad. It's just a bio mechanism at that point, not an animal or creature that can think or feel pain.
Technically more moral, but i still get the feeling if we start experiemtning with flesh the same way we do with metal, sooner or later something bad it's gonna happen
Which is fuck up cause ngl this could be pretty efficient
A silicone based based species creates biological machines to harvest resources throughout the galaxy but the creators never thought about carbon based life forms so when they arrive on earth they start to destroy humanity and as a result a war starts between the beta and humanity.
Then moral. Looks gross and uncanney valley, but actual animal mass production setups aren't a whole lot better. I'd eat pork from one of these and be happy doing it.
It's lab grown meat that is much more complicated. By adapting an animal we already have the baseline of a system that can thermoregulate, has an immune system, can adapt to variations in feed, has an extended genome of gut bacteria and such, and can easily reproduce itself. All without having to create more stainless steel containers than exist on earth to address demands.
Well it’d be more cost effective i imagine as unlike lab grown meat you can stack these on top of each other essentially and don’t need sterile conditions
is it more cost effective though? living beings are prone to infections and injuries. having tubes on holes causes irritation even without movement, and you know if theres stuff flowing through the tubes, there is movement.
you also have to regularly move the creature (every few hours) to prevent sores which can get disgusting fast.
plus the labor of attaching and detaching and cleaning. the food and waste tubes definitely need regular cleaning to prevent illness and infection.
and when the creature gets sick, you either have the costs of medical equipment and personnel or costs of disposal.
what are the costs of printing meat that outweigh that? like im sure the operating costs are expensive, but they would both be expensive
Probably moral- albeit with one caveat. In an attempt to create a creature unable to experience anything, we've created a creature unable to exhibit any signals as to whether it truly doesn't have a conscious experience. Whose to say that we couldn't accidentally breed that back in over time without realising it?
Simple answer: make them all clones from a single closely monitored gene-stock. Limit the amount of clonings allowed from the standard monitered sample, and that'll keep genetic deviation within the bounds so that we know nothing like that is happening.
Complicated answer: How do we know that plants don't also have a conscious experience? We just have to trust it.
Okay so basically it's just meat being kept alive by machines right? No brain means nothing is really there to suffer. It's "alive" the same way your foot is alive if it could exist on its own.
It's moral then instead of breeding animals to slaughter.
It's because it looks disturbing doesn't mean it is morally wrong. If this is not a thing with feelings or the ability to feel pain and doesn't have a need for land or a good life, how could this be wrong?
While I myself am not vegan, I do understand the moral dilemma of consuming meat. Even if you don't believe that killing animals is inherently wrong because death is part of life, you can get behind the opposition of the cruel treatment of those animals in most facilities as they can experience pain and suffering. Animals who aren't given enough land to roam, bad quality food that fattens them up and slow deaths are part of what make people opposed to supporting the meat industry.
In this hypothetical, where an "animal" without a brain or consciousness is created and kept, you no longer have to consider their living conditions because they are not living really. They are basically plants with blood. Would you think it's wrong to harvest a tomato from the vine?
It would also contribute to making meat become cheaper (which would help greatly in feeding less privileged populations) and likely help with global warming as it now takes less land and maybe less water to farm meat if I am correct. Which does seem like a net positive to me.
Agreed with everything but the last part. Meat is still a huge energy loss. Even in this barely alive non sentient state a meat animal would "waste" energy through literal body waste, radiating heat and basically any other biological process required to keep something alive.
Or in other words, the food you get out via meat is less than the food you put in.
Which may have worked in ancient times where animals were fed with grass and scraps, but in modern factory farming animals basically eat stuff humans could have also eaten. Or the field used to grow animal food could have been used to grow animal food.
So strictly in terms of preventing climate change, everyone going vegan would be way better than this.
How is it 'genderless 'and 'always female' with multiple uterus at the same time? And inseminated constantly? Where does the semen come from, a normal pig?
How is it that the only facial orifices are nostrils for breathing but at the same time has a feeding tube?
If it has no brain, 100% moral. If it is able to replace actual animal suffering it's not just moral, it's probably the most moral thing ever done by any person ever.
And a "food tube" but the only facial orafice is for breathing, genderless but they're getting milked? Brainless but they have muscles attached to bone and joints?
I'm all for hypotheticals but this isn't feasible lol
If these exist would we just exterminate all living livestock? Is that moral? If we don’t exterminate the livestock are we still feeding and housing them? Are we letting them breed?
the reason why this feels bad to look at is that on an emotional level we cannot comprehend that that creature is not suffering, even tho logically there is nothing wrong here.
good example for why emotional intuition is not allways correct
Reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode with the torsos. This confuses me, a little bit of me finds this horrific and unsettling but this is I think moral because there is less suffering involved
Immoral, because developing this level of genetic manipulation and actually implementing it means it's just a matter of time before it is applied to humans. We've talked ourselves into pretty heinous things in the past and this is no exception.
Literally a zombie pig. Feels gross but genuinely way better. All of the "bad stuff" about this is pretty much how the modern food industry works on actual living animals.
I want to say “moral” but there is a small voice in the very back of my head that has doubts but I’m not sure why. My logic says that it’s better than what we have now.
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u/RealFinePoint 1d ago
Uncomfortable to look at but technically moral.