This Is Just Sick

[atlanticat]

I don't read New Scientist but I find it rather telling that the moral objections to this article don't appear until the second page, which a majority of people won't actually bother reading because--hey, it's an extra click I have to make

Comments

[herbivorous]

Hear, hear.

BTW, there is a small, family-owned farm in Ottawa that offers CSA-style meat shares:

http://www.cedarvalleysustainable.com/

[atlanticat]

Wow, that's the first one I've seen offering meat consistently, good deal. Unfortunately, that's probably twice as much meat as we consume in a month. We normally just go to one of Chicago's farmers' markets once a month or so and get what we need--Green City has local organic free-range chicken, lamb, goat, and eggs, and non-organic but still free-range elk.

I just can't wait until I can raise it myself....

[samwize]

That's as disturbing as saying "well, we can't do away with child abuse so we can just engineer children with no nerve endings!"No. No, it really isn't: cows aren't sentient. Or at least have no where near the kind of inner life that a child does. I do not think it inappropriate to judge that human and animal life have different moral values. If I am forced to choose between the life of a child and a sheep, I would chose the child and call anyone who chose otherwise a monster

[atlanticat]

Cows aren't sentient?? Maybe not to the level of humans, but they are indeed sentient. They can and do think and they're aware of their surroundings

[samwize]

See, now you're arguing past nearly every point I brought up and not addressing them

[samwize]

Oh, and I really just don't understand your first line up there...

I didn't see any objections to the article, and if you were referring to the technology itself, they put a link to a whole editorial "Pain-free animals would not be guilt-free" right at the very top of the article as well as the very bottom. That's pretty damn unusual for a science magazine and shows that they really do recognize that this is ethically tricky ground we should really think about...

[atlanticat]

When the article was originally posted, those links did not exist. They were added later as an afterthought, or perhaps in reaction to the article. I know because I read it as a link from a different community and other folk commented on the additions at a later point.

[samwize]

And how do you interpret that addition? Do you think they did it out of appeasement to the peta-crowd? Because they already had an editorial on the subject, saw the traffic/comments/emails and thought it made good web-editorial sense? Do you still find it "telling"? If so, what does it tell you? Because to me, it just says "We're a science magazine.".