A: It depends ... will the brain-dead chickens taste better?
They would have to electrically stimulate the muscles, otherwise there would be no meat to eat.
Ethical? We kill animals and eat them. That’s the way the world works. Chickens kill worms, insects and other living organisms to feed themselves just as we do. Chickens even kill and eat each other if one of them gets injured and shows blood.
There’s an Old Testament admonition not to use meat cut from a living animal for food, so yes there is a level of depravity involved in doing this, for Jews and Christians at least.
Modern factory farming is already disturbing enough, clipping their beaks because raising them so thoroughly packed into a space causes them to go berserk.
Treat them mercifully, at least give them a halfway decent existence for the short time they’re on this earth; it’s not as if they aren’t already giving their lives to sustain us.
Surgically altering their brains so they are presumably unaware that their feet have been amputated, theyr’e immobilized and have a feeding tube shoved down their throat does not strike me as merciful, it strikes me as vile.
And, before anybody goes off, no, I’m not vegetarian. I grew up around farm animals, and any decent farmer will care for his livestock, treating them well. That their ultimate fate was the dinner table mattered not, don’t be cruel to them.
“rendering them effectively brain-dead.”
The morons who propose things like this obviously know nothing about chickens. No chicken has a thought in its head worth considering. Anyone with the slightest bit of concern for the welfare of chickens that are raised to be consumed is brain-dead themselves.
Democrats and RINOs farm brain-dead semi-humans all the time.
Only in a Godless world, gone mad, can this sort of thing make any sense at all.
This is beyond crazy and evil.
It would be worse for us (and my dogs) wouldn’t it? The chickens would move around even less and tube feeding them nutrients????
We just spent a tidy sum today taking our pup for an emergency vet visit. Turned out she had pancreatitis.
I cook her food and use chicken thigh/leg quarters and now I will be using breasts—her fat intake needs to be 6%-8%.
She has heart problems and needed a low salt diet—it was cheaper to cook her food than to buy the processed ones like Blue Buffalo yada.
I have also noticed since the late 80’s, buying fried chicken at the chains— there is much more yucky fat that needs to be picked through.
I think this idea is brain-dead. I don’t even see it as more humane.
Obama supports this research. . . he needs more brain-dead voters !! (evil grin)
a chicken-wing ping
I don’t want a world where only human beings and soybeans are alive.
All lives are precious, including those of the animals we are raising for food—and they should be treated humanely.
there are state university systems that have been doing it for years with their students.
I hear that they’re working on a similar system for cows.
They call it the Mootrix.
[W/apologies to Scott Kurtz.]
I don’t like it. I like the idea of a chicken having spent some time in the sunlight, breathing the air, eating some insects off the ground.
No, this is.. kind of sick.
The chicken is just a machine that converts grain into tasty meat protein. Rather than the disturbing process described in this article, why not concentrate on developing a more efficient machine for the conversion? The proteins that comprise meat can be grown artificially with all the chemical (and nutritional) properties of the “real thing” (if still somewhat lacking in some of the flavor subtleties). Spend the effort on refining that process, not in developing some diabolical machinery like this that still uses living tissue, regardless of how lobotomized (or “Democrat-ized”) it is.
The democRat party is an advertisement for Soylent Green.
5.56mm
I had some really crappy quality chicken tonight. Now I know why.
I saw his right after pitching my chicken in the garbage.
Now, I am gonna go puke.