Créer des animaux qui souffriront moins...

[Animal 0]

Recent advances in neuroscience suggest it may soon be
possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they
suffer much less.



Not Grass-Fed, but at Least Pain-Free

By ADAM SHRIVER
Published: February 18, 2010

St. Louis

IN the 35 years since Peter Singer's book "Animal
Liberation" was published, jump-starting the animal rights
movement in the United States, the number of animals used in
cosmetics testing and scientific research has dropped
significantly, and the number of dogs and cats killed in
shelters has fallen by more than half. Nevertheless, because
the amount of red meat that Americans eat per capita has
held steady at more than 100 pounds a year as the population
has increased, more animals than ever suffer from injuries
and stress on factory farms.

Veal calves and gestating sows are so confined as to suffer
painful bone and joint problems. The unnatural high-grain
diets provided in feedlots cause severe gastric distress in
many animals. And faulty or improperly used stun guns cause
the painful deaths of thousands of cows and pigs a year.

We are most likely stuck with factory farms, given that they
produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume. But it
is still possible to reduce the animals' discomfort -
through neuroscience. Recent advances suggest it may soon be
possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they
suffer much less.

This prospect stems from a new understanding of how mammals
sense pain. The brain, it turns out, has two separate
pathways for perceiving pain: a sensory pathway that
registers its location, quality (sharp, dull or burning, for
example) and intensity, and a so-called affective pathway
that senses the pain's unpleasantness. This second pathway
appears to be associated with activation of the brain's
anterior cingulate cortex, because people who have suffered
damage to this part of the brain still feel pain but no
longer find it unpleasant. (The same is true of people who
are given morphine, because there are more receptors for
opiates in the affective pain pathway than in the sensory
pain pathway.)

Neuroscientists have found that by damaging a laboratory
rat's anterior cingulate cortex, or by injecting the rat
with morphine, they can likewise block its affective
perception of pain. The rat reacts to a heated cage floor by
withdrawing its paws, but it doesn't bother avoiding the
places in its cage where it has learned the floor is likely
to be heated up.

Recently, scientists have learned to genetically engineer
animals so that they lack certain proteins that are
important to the operation of the anterior cingulate cortex.
Prof. Min Zhuo and his colleagues at the University of
Toronto, for example, have bred mice lacking enzymes that
operate in affective pain pathways. When these mice
encounter a painful stimulus, they withdraw their paws
normally, but they do not become hypersensitive to a
subsequent painful stimulus, as ordinary mice do.

Prof. Zhou-Feng Chen and his colleagues here at Washington
University have engineered mice so that they lack the gene
for a peptide associated with the anterior cingulate gyrus.
Like the animals given brain lesions, these mice are
normally sensitive to heat and mechanical pain, but they do
not avoid situations where they experience such pain.

Given the similarity among all mammals' neural systems, it
is likely that scientists could genetically engineer pigs
and cows in the same way. 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.

The people who consumed meat from such genetically
engineered livestock would also be safe. Knockout animals
have specific proteins removed, rather than new ones
inserted, so there's no reason to think that their meat
would pose more health risks for humans than ordinary meat
does.

If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether, the least we
can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the
animals that must live and die on them. It would be far
better than doing nothing at all.

Adam Shriver is a doctoral student in the
philosophy-neuroscience-psychology program at Washington
University.

[hop 0]

Animals Without Pain, Humans Without Conscience?

by Stephanie Ernst - 19/02/10
http://challengeoppression.com/2010/02/19/animals-without-pain-humans-without-conscience/

Bizarre, si j'essaie de poster l'article, rien n'apparait. C'est un message vide qui est publié. Si je l'édite, le texte est toujours là, mais il reste en mémoire, toujours rien quand j'envoie.

[Animal 0]

Le voici ma belle hop! Je n'aurai malheureusement pas le temps de le lire avant la fin de la journée (rendez-vous chez le doc ce matin, puis des courses...)
A+ tard



Animals Without Pain, Humans Without Conscience?
2010 February 19

Stephanie Ernst
.It’s an idea that we saw and heard floated last year: animals “engineered” not to feel pain. And yesterday, Adam Shriver of Washington University, of my own city of St. Louis, explored in the New York Times his solution to the physical suffering we impose on farmed animals; he plainly states that we are “stuck with factory farms, given that they produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume,” and thus, his solution is apparently some kind of necessary, moral, noble one (and for this article, my hat tips once again to my expert link-providing friend on Twitter).

I’m left wondering whether they teach critical thinking in that doctoral “philosophy-neuroscience-psychology” program in which Mr. Shriver is enrolled, while hoping that people in the general public see the wrongness of this and stop to consider whether, if this is where we’ve finally arrived, they’re really willing to go this far to continue doing something that already contradicts the values that most hold deep down.


First, let’s just look at what Shriver and those in his camp are advocating — that we damage animals’ brains, so that we can damage the rest of their bodies with less guilt, so that we can continue treating them like inanimate objects rather than, oh, I don’t know, rethink what despicable things we’re doing in the first place. The idea that the solution to treating them as objects is to treat them even more like objects (and experiment on who-knows-how-many animals to achieve this non-solution) boggles the mind.

When Shriver published these thoughts in Neuroethics last year, Marji responded at the Animal Place blog, and Philosophia and Animal Liberation crafted a thoughtful response as well, so I recommend visits there. [Edit: Unbeknownst to either one of us, Mary and I were writing on this topic at the same time this morning; check out her post at Animal Person as well.] Both are smart, thoughtful posts with excellent points about what eliminating animals’ ability to sense their own pain would do and not do, including in the “not” column eliminate their ability to suffer in general. We human animals know well that some of the worst suffering we experience can sometimes be not related to physical injury and pain at all — and we human animals know well that a great deal of the suffering we impose on our fellow animals is also outside the realm of physical pain. Oh yes, the physical pain we cause them is massive, but the mental and emotional anguish we cause? Equally unimaginable. And were we to suddenly not have to worry (as if our society worries so much now) about their feeling the physical pain we’re causing them, I suspect the ways in which we cause them concurrent mental and emotional distress would only increase.

But put aside the discussion of what this horrid practice would and would not entail, and the very premise of Shriver’s argument is incredible. Self-serving and dishonest, it relies on an outright lie: that “we cannot avoid factory farms altogether.” I want to ask Mr. Shriver, “Are you serious?” But clearly he is. He’s been pushing this for a while. Yet surely someone who’s smart enough to work his way into a doctoral program knows that not only can we “avoid factory farms”; we can avoid animal farming altogether. We are not required as a society or as individuals to keep eating animals. And one of the remarkable aspects of Mr. Shriver’s so-called solution, among all the many proposals and justifications offered by people who want to continue eating animals, is that most other people at least pretend to care enough to call for a reduction in the consumption of animals. But Shriver is so ultimately uncritical of what humans are doing and so unwilling to suggest that we just take responsibility and live ethically that he’d rather insist, boldly and with utter dishonesty, that not only the eating of animals but even the intensive farming of animals is impossible to stop, and we should just embrace it and go to extraordinary scientific lengths to make sure we can keep doing it.

Apparently, the vastly simpler, kinder, more logical, and more economical solution — that if we want to be kinder to animals and not impose suffering on them, we stop eating them – is just too simple. It’s not the kind of simple solution that propels you into journals and the New York Times or that creates opportunities for loads of research money to come your way, I guess.

“The least we can do,” Shriver says, “is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on [farms]. It would be far better than doing nothing at all.” Talk about a false dichotomy. Our options are not limited to “change nothing; continue on the current path” and “cause brain damage to every one of the tens of billions of farmed animals in the nation.” The least we can do, Mr. Shriver, is first acknowledge that there is no “must” here and then behave as if we have a conscience and not cause them the “unpleasantness of pain” in the first place. The least we can do, if we believe in nonviolence and not killing and causing suffering for nothing more than our own pleasure, is not eat animals or what comes from them, not turn them into units of production, in the first place.

Shriver assures readers that “the people who consumed meat [and dairy and eggs, I presume?] from such genetically engineered livestock would also be safe.” Maybe their physical bodies would be safe. But moral integrity would have no chance of coming out of such a “solution” intact.

I refuse to believe that this is what we’ve come to, that we are so selfish a society that when faced with the horrors, crises, and injustices of our own making, we would devote ourselves to finding out how we can continue rather than how we can stop — that we would do this, that we would go this far, before simply living our values, before making a far more logical change. Animal agriculture is unsustainable (a problem not addressed at all by Shriver’s plan) and cruel and unjust. But we don’t need nauseating, elaborate schemes such as Shriver’s so that we can continue it. We just need to stop it.

—
Photo by Elias Bröms retrieved from Wikimedia Commons
http://challengeoppression.com/2010/02/19/animals-without-pain-humans-without-conscience/

[hop 0]

Merci Do !

Citation :

(rendez-vous chez le doc ce matin, puis des courses...)

Ca ne va pas bien ?

[Animal 0]

allo ma chère hop,

Je suis rentrée tard. Comme tout est loin d'ici, chaque fois qu'il y a les courses à faire, et qu'en plus j'ai un rendez-vous chez le doc, j'en ai toujours pour presqu'une journée complète.
Depuis quelques mois, en fait depuis près d'un an maintenant, j'ai des douleurs au niveau du foie et de l'estomac et comme ça semble aller en s'empirant, j'ai décidé de revoir mon doc. Je dois maintenant prendre un rendez-vous dans une clinique pour passer un examen car il dit que selon mes symptômes, il se pourrait que j'ai une pierre qui se soit formée entre l'intestin et le foie ... (Je n'ai jamais entendu parler de ça). Comme j'ai déjà été opérée, (on m'a enlevé la vésicule biliaire), je ne pensais pas que je pourrais à nouveau souffrir d'un problème à ce niveau... mais, enfin, tant que je n'aurai pas passer cet examen, je n'en saurai pas plus. (Je suis sur une liste d'attente et il se pourrait que je doive attendre 2 mois avant de le passer...) Faut pas être pressé!


Concernant l'article de Stephanie Ernst, elle a tellement raison. Je n'aurais pas pu mieux exprimer ce que j'ai ressenti en lisant cette nouvelle.
Merci hop et bonne nuit,

[hop 0]

Quelle poisse alors ! Il ne t'a rien prescrit ou conseillé contre les douleurs ?

[Animal 0]

même si elles ne me font pas grand chose, je prends déjà des médicaments pour les douleurs à l'estomac depuis plusieurs mois. Mais ce ne sont pas des douleurs insupportables hop. C'est peut-être juste de l'anxiété. J'ai toujours été très stressée et très angoissée et ça s'arrange pas en vieillissant

[hop 0]

Citation :

C'est peut-être juste de l'anxiété. J'ai toujours été très stressée et très angoissée et ça s'arrange pas en vieillissant

C'est souvent la source de beaucoup de maux et sans doute ça qu'on devrait traiter au départ ou apprendre à gérer. Je ne pense pas aux médics psy qui sont trop addictants, mais aux techniques de respiration, à l'acupuncture, à l'auriculothérapie, au yoga ou autres...

[Animal 0]

Je suis d'accord avec toi hop et je crois aussi que la plupart de nos maux physiques sont souvent causés par notre mal-être intérieur.
Je n'ai jamais voulu prendre d'antidépresseurs, même si on a souvent voulu m'en prescrire. Ici au Québec, il y a pas mal de charlatans dans le domaine des médecines alternatives et ces soins coûtent très très chers. Mon père avait déjà eu recours à de l'accupuncture il y a quelques années et il s'était fait brûler la peau du ventre au deuxième degré avec des ventouses. Chaque visite lui coûtait 60$ pour une heure de «traitements»... On a su plus tard que les accupuncteurs de cette clinique n'étaient même pas enregristrés auprès du gouvernement. Il y a aussi bien des gens qui s'affichent comme étant des thérapeutes, comme des massothérapeutes par exemple, mais qui ne le sont pas. Et puis, il y a plusieurs années, un chiropraticien que je consultais pour des torticolis récurrents m'a causé une hernie cervicale, donc pour toutes ces raisons, j'ai pas mal de réticences. Il doit sûrement en exister des bons, mais je reste toujours méfiante

Bonne fin d'après-midi ma chère hop

[hop 0]

Mon Dieu ! Compte-tenu de ces expériences, je comprends tes réticences.