I have been listening to a fairly interesting book - Life Changing: How Humans are Altering Life on Earth by Helen Pilcher. Helen reads it and is a little ponderous and emphatic about it which is a trifle annoying. Anyway, I got to this section about gene-altering pigs so they don't die of swine flu or some other disease that costs pork manufacturers countless millions. And I was just deranged by the absurdity of it. Just don't factory farm fucking pigs!
The scientist who wants to do this says it's about pig welfare. My foot, it's about pig welfare. It's about human profits. Oh poor meat growers that 900 million animals dies of disease in the US before they can be slaughtered. They still manage to kill 9 billion of them.
It's laughable. Clearly it's about money. If it were about welfare not profits they'd already raise pigs in a pig-friendly way. The reason they don't is because free range pigs who brought up their own piglets would be less (or not all all) commercially viable.
Welfare! FFS.
Humans use 1/3 of the earth's flowing water and a quarter of its grains to support factory farmed animals. The farmers in the USA are subsidised to pollute the water, encourage climate change, breed super bugs, enact cruelty to animals and provide consumers with cheap unhealthy food while also lessening the efficacy of anti-biotics. So the tech fix for all this SHITE is: stop pigs dying before we kill them.
Well done, humanity.
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