If You Know How a Cow Feels, Will You Eat Less Meat?

Scientific American ^ | 07/11/2013 | By Anne C. Mulkern and ClimateWire

[SeekAndFind]

STANFORD, Calif. -- Inside a lab on the Stanford University campus here, students experienced what it might feel like to be a cow.

They donned a virtual reality helmet and walked on hands and feet while in a virtual mirror they saw themselves as bovine. As the animal was jabbed with an electrical prod, a lab worker poked a volunteer's side with a sticklike device. The ground shook to simulate the prod's vibrations. The cow at the end was led toward a slaughterhouse.

Participants then recorded what they ate for the next week. The study sought to uncover whether temporarily "becoming" a cow prompted reduced meat consumption.

The motivation wasn't to make people vegetarians, said Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. But the project hoped to uncover whether virtual reality could alter behaviors that tax the environment and contribute to climate change.

"If somebody becomes an animal, do they gain empathy for that animal and think about its plight?" Bailenson asked. "In this case, empathy toward the animal also coincides with an environmental benefit, which is that [not eating] animals consumes less energy."

It's one of several environment-related experiments Bailenson is conducting in the lab, all tailored toward revealing whether there are new ways to encourage environmental preservation. Volunteers also have virtually chopped down a tree, a study aimed at examining attitudes toward paper use. Others took a virtual reality shower while eating lumps of coal -- literally consuming it -- to gain insight into how much was needed to heat the water.

[GraceG]

Along those lines: If they knew how the BABY felt would they stop doing abortions?

That could be a cool project for when we get direct brain connection interfaces...

Feel the pain a baby feels when it is injected with saline and has it’s limbs ripped off....

[GraceG]

Hmmm... I would probably continue to stuff my face if I were this cow...

[pabianice]

If you know how a Liberal feels, will you watch less network TV?

[AD from SpringBay]

Consider the conscientious cow, based on the presumption of ‘how a cow feels’. This cow, because it is a creature of Gaia and knows only purity and innocence and the best of all intentions (unlike evil humankind), knows in its heart of hearts that waste is bad. It would therefore, knowing it is to be killed for food, want nothing to go to waste. Ergo - said cow would want everyone to eat-up, so as to avoid having its life squandered. This makes me want a double-cheeseburger, and not a single - for the sake of the cow’s conscience, and for the sake of momma earth.

[philled]

While touching the tip of your index finger with your thumb, press the fleshy base of that thumb with the pointer finger of your other hand. That is exactly how a cow SHOULD feel when it is medium rare. Knowing that feeling enables me to enjoy eating them.

[roamer_1]

As the animal was jabbed with an electrical prod, a lab worker poked a volunteer's side with a sticklike device.

Silly liberal scientists... Any redneck boy can tell you exactly what it feels like to get jolted by a cattle prod... or a bull prod.

[hattend]

No.

[Nifster]

What a bunch of wusses. The BIG field trip when I was in third grade was to go down to the slaughter house (I grew up in cow country) followed by a trip to the rodeo. I ate beef before I went I have eaten beef ever since.

I am so tired of the vegan do gooders can we ship them to the Moscow airport to keep Snowden company?

[rey]

“Actually, animals do feel pain as acutely as we do.”

Thanks for your response

yeah, yeah and Black Beauty really ran that range of emotions and animals are just like us and communicate and transmit knowledge and history and emotion and faith just like us.

This anthropomorphization of the world is the left’s way of whittling away our status in the world and controlling everything in the name of a supposed equality. Gays are just like us, trees are just like us, Muslims are just like us, criminals are just like us, Travon Martin is just like us (Could have would have been my son), Lassie is just like us, all animalas and all things are just like us, in fact they are better because they have a nobility so much higher than ours, if children’s, and now adult literature and film is to be believed.

Animals feel pain, no doubt, and yes, the signs are difficult to decern, but I see them because I have the experience to see them. Animals do not exhibit pain like humans because, as you said, it makes them a target in nature, in fact, it makes them a target within their own species. Animals that exhibit pain did not breed because they were eaten by predators and/or driven from the herd because of the liability they brought to the herd.

And, for the record, just because they do not feel or experience pain like us does not give us license to abuse them. First and foremost it demeans our character to do so and secondly an animal in pain does not perform well and cruel treatment is counterprioductive toward our use of them.

Animals are not people in any way. That is the point of the Stanford study; to give animals human qualities and to demonize those of us who recognize a difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.

To equate animal status, or even environmental status with human status is the tool environmentalists, animal rights activists, and the EPA use to remove our dominion over the animal kingdom and place animals in a dominion over us via their human agent, the EPA aka Federal authority.

Be careful with this moral relativism and humanization of anything.

[henkster]

Cows were meant to be eaten. That’s why God made them out of beef.

[Little Ray]

Nope. Just make me appreciate my beef even more...

[ridesthemiles]

Are they going to study a DAIRY cow & try to find out how it feels to have your 4 teats pulled twice a day for milking???

This is beyond stupid.

How much taxpayer money was granted for this nonsense???

[Gandalf_The_Gray]

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Seems like a plan to me...

Regards,
GtG

[a fool in paradise]

“If you know what a fetus feels, would you still support abortion?”

Scientific American ever do that article?

[a fool in paradise]

Have you ever asked a cow for the time? What day it is?

A cow tried to convince me it was Moonday once.

[Liberty Valance]

[GeronL]

right!

[RegulatorCountry]

That looks like it’s from the infamous “you want some of this” berserk cow GIF, lol. I’d post it if I wasn’t on a mobile device.

http://weknowmemes.com/2012/03/you-want-some-of-this-cow/

[Nailbiter]

mooooo

[catnipman]

I remember when “Scientific American” used to be scientific. And American.

Now it’s just another bleeding-heart lib rag, like all the rest. Now not too much difference in the quality of “science” published in SA and Family Circle.