Yesterday morning, as I was about to turn off my computer and fly out the door for an early morning yoga class, I received an email from one of my students with the following editorial in the New York Times.
OPINION February 19, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor: Not Grass-Fed, but at Least Pain-Free
The author, Adam Shriver, is a doctoral student in the philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program at Washington University. According to his editorial, “Recent advances in neuroscience suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less.”
I contemplated the insidious implications of removing the ability to feel pain all the way to my yoga class. By the time I arrived I was fed up with the arrogance of the human race.
When I first started teaching forty years ago I had this innocent hope that yoga would lead to enlightenment. Enlightenment begins with empathy. Empathy encompasses the ability to experience the pain and suffering of other living things. Empathy is the first step. And, as J. Krishnamurt pointed out, “The first step is the last step.”
Not a word in this New York Times editorial about an animal’s innate emotional and physical needs.
The whole time I was teaching I was thinking in the back of my mind, “How can these scientists be certain that just because an animal no longer expresses a reaction to pain, that it no longer feels pain? What makes these arrogant neuroscientists think they know what the animal is actually experiencing? Just because they can genetically engineer a creature that does not respond in a normal way to pain, does that mean the pain itself does not exist?”
And also, consider the absurdity: this whole project is predicated on the assumption that animals in factory farms are inevitably destined to experience horrible pain. Did it ever dawn on these scientific geniuses that they could solve the problem a lot more simply and directly by just fixing the damn factory farms?
Plus I can’t help but wonder, “If the animal does not feel pain, how does it keep from hurting itself?”
Related links:
Should Animals Be Genetically Engineered So They Don’t Feel Pain:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/19/should-animals-be-genetic_n_469135.html
Below is a link to a six-minute video produced by Compassionate World Farming. http://www.ciwf.org.uk/about_us/history_achievements/default.aspx
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I was equally disturbed by this awful editorial. The NYT is usually pretty pro-animals, and this absolutely warranted a response from them.
The article says this:
“Because the sensory dimension of the animals’ pain would be preserved, they would still be able to recognize and avoid, when possible, situations where they might be bruised or otherwise injured.”
What does this really mean?
drop the whole notion of enlightenment, drop the striving, drop the thinking about it or what it is and you MAY experience it.
otherwise you’re pretty much like the cow you talk about it.
one suggestion- go to your yoga classes in a peaceful yogic manner.
don’t fly out the door.
Thank you Suza for your thoughtful and enlightening comments on a truly “brave new world” approach to animal welfare.
(And I hope you pay no attention to commenters whose ignorance in spiritual matters is exceeded only by their rudeness.)
Check out Should Animals Be Genetically Engineered So They Don’t Feel Pain:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/19/should-animals-be-genetic_n_469135.html
I would rather be upset about the atrocities on the Planet than turn a blind eye in order to maintain a peaceful, yogic state.
I find these neuroscientists absolutely disgusting and their lack of compassion and ignorance towards animals equally disgusting. You can bet their is a lot of money involved for their research.
Thanks for writing, and so eloquently.
Empathy, taken seriously, applied universally, is still a radical concept.
When meat eaters start suffering from mad cow disease en masse, I’m going to laugh my ass off! The hicks who eat at McDonalds are a joke.
Academic science is a very strange world. You work so hard to get in, and you get immersed in a culture in which activities that are against your basic nature are commonplace and expected, you become progressively and increasingly acculturated. I remember when I first served as the requisite graduate student representative on the Animal Care Council at UCSB (the board that reviews all proposed animal research at the university to ensure it meets guidelines for humane treatment in accordance with federal law governing institutions receiving federal grant money). A project was being reviewed in which rabbits were being ‘anesthetized’ by stroking their sternum before they were to receive an intra-cardiac injection of a drug. I flagged it and questioned how we knew that this method eliminated pain, that perhaps it just eliminated motor output and, therefore, the associated behavioral response to pain. I was given no good answer and was treated like an annoyance to the long process of shuffling through the proposals and approving them. I sat on that council for a year, and nothing real was ever questioned. At first I just stayed silent when I had questions, so afraid was I of being further shunned by my superiors; but then, if truth be told, I simply stopped noticing. I’d like to think that world is changing in the right direction, and then I read something like this. If I’m really going to be honest with myself, I begin to see all the ways in which I need to continue to transform myself — all the things I just don’t process everyday that add to some being’s misery down the line. So much to do . . .
Thank you, Peggy, for weighing in… more another day.