In college I had to take creative writing. We were required to create a satirical essay.

Mine was about breeding anencephalic animals (animals without a brain) to reduce animal cruelty, which would be put on a form of life support.

My premise was that since people haven't stopped eating meat because of the ethical concerns, so to alleviate them another way, we could breed animals that were basically bags of meat.

I wanted people to think about it.

Animals with no brain would possess no ability for perception of pain.

They wouldn't experience fear.

They'd experience nothing because they had no brain.

It should be theoretically ethical to eat them.

People born without brains aren't considered legally alive. If you have no self-awareness you're just a body.

My point wasn't that we should breed such animals. It would be expensive. People would be horrified even though it's more ethical.

@Elizafox Agreed it would be more ethical. Not sure it'd be more resource efficient/environmentally friendly, which is another reason for not eating meat.

@brwarner @Elizafox lab-grown meat has a much better potential to solve this. If you're going to get rid of the brain, why not everything else that we don't eat too? You also don't have the problem of needing the animals to move or exercise, and you can do it in a sterile environment to reduce the antibiotics needed. It also scales a lot more effectively than traditional farming.

@Gargoylezoo @brwarner I actually addressed that. People would have concerns about something grown in a lab.

An animal bred without a brain would be more natural, ironically. Anencephalic animals are occasionally born.

@Elizafox @brwarner *sigh*. That's probably true. I honestly have very little patience for the whole "natural necessarily equals good" fallacy. It's a cute, convenient heuristic, but more often than not it's wrong. Not saying artificial is necessarily good either, just that things have to be taken case by case.

@Gargoylezoo @brwarner When you deal in value-based judgements you get back illogical arguments as change.

@Elizafox @Gargoylezoo "But about protein?"

@brwarner @Gargoylezoo The biologist in me sees it as an argument about what source of nutrients and protein are we going to use.

Multicellular life is pretty much 80% similar.

You have far more in common with a cabbage than not, genetically speaking.

Ethically, feelings always come into it. I don't know how to process those but in any case we should at least reduce the harm we cause.

@Elizafox @Gargoylezoo @brwarner Have you read Jonathan Haidt et al's work on moral disgust? There's a lot of research, but the one that I always remember is when they hypnotized half a group to feel disgust when seeing the word "often", the other half to feel disgust when seeing the word "take", and watched them come up with the most amazingly contrived moral justifications to justify their feeling of disgust.