Posted on 07/12/2013 7:29:20 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
Ah, No.
OMG.....wonder if we could get money to study what it feels like to be a LIBERAL IDIOT!
Along those lines: If they knew how the BABY felt would they stop doing abortions?
I would have a very difficult time eating meat after going to a slaughterhouse, but I like meat, just couldn’t watch be in the area. Most likely would have to turn to fish/seafood and chicken.
This is what “college” has become. Teaching morons what it’s like to be a cow. Have you ever asked a cow for the time? What day it is?
Or we can just raise our own or buy it directly from the farmer who raises it the old-fashioned way. Good point about the abortions. There are far too many people who say they care about animals, but care nothing for unborn humans.
Since the only cows I eat are dead they don’t feel anything.
If this is how a baby feels, will you abort less?
“If this is how a baby feels, will you abort less?”
WINNER!
I don’t know how a sewer worker feels, either, but guess what I’m not going to stop doing?
Animals do not feel painas people do.
Firstly, they are simply dropped on the ground at birth and within a short period of time are up and running with their mom. No human can do that.
A couple of months later, they are gathered, roped, tied down, injected with vaccines, branded (burned), any horns are cut off and nubs burned, if male, the lower two thirds of their scrotum are cut away and their testicles pulled from their body. In every single case, when they are let go, they will jump up and run away, sometimes charge a cowboy. They will all walk off with their moms.
No human could endure that and walk away. THEY DO NOT FEEL PAIN LIKE HUMANS!!
This article really mooved me.
Have you ever heard the tortured screams of Broccoli as it is being harvested?
Would we then weep for the lowly carrot?
if you look at a cow you will see a large cube of meat with four short legs sticking out below. If you read about cows you will discover they have five stomachs for converting grass or grain to beef. I think they were perfectly designed to produce beef for some reason.
Only IDIOTS could think of spending this large sum of money on something so bizarre as this; while we continue to go deeper into unrecoverable debt.
THAT’s the reply I was waiting for!
A little meat mostly in the form of fish is probably beneficial, that is as far as I will go, even their deaths probably do take longer than the slaughter of livestock animals. Abortion has nothing to do with not eating meat. They don’t eat eggs not because the eggs are fertilized (they are not) but because they come from chicken that are badly mistreated on farms.
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