Life's Persistent Questions

Is it maltreatment if I'm born with it?

Continuing on my quest to save foie gras, I ask the question what lies in the future for this delicacy? According to the Governator, he hopes that his ban will motivate the foie gras farmers to:

"evolve and perfect a humane way for a duck to consume grain to increase the size of its liver through natural processes."

And the answer is... leptin receptor knockout ducks! That's right. Leptin is satiety molecule that inhibits feeding and promote energy expenditure. The receptor knockout (ob/ob) mice are ginormous creatures and have fatty livers. The main complaints of animal rights group is that the ducks are been force-fed multiples of their body-weight everyday, and the duck grew to such abnormal size that its quality of life become horrendous. Now if through genetic engineering, the duck can't help itself but eat, is it still inhumane?

Of course, a predictable objection would be the fact people will be consuming genetically engineered animals. However, in genetically knockout animals, you are really only deleting pre-existing DNA sequence, but not introducing exogeneous sequence, so there is really very little probability of genetic transformation of the human. Of course, this is probably beyond most average persons' understanding of genetic engineering at this point. But we could only hope.

posted by hedgehog @ 9:50 AM