Holy Cow (rant)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/opinion/19shriver.html

Okay, so I just saw this in today's paper and it prompted me to write about it NOW -- quite a feat, as i haven't thought much about my blog since about the time classes started.

Today's NYT includes this op-ed, which explains that if we can't bring ourselves to stop killing animals en masse in order to eat them, we can at least use genetic engineering to make them less susceptible to pain. Holy leaping batshit. So now we can not think about the fact that we "engineered" many of these animals to begin with through selective breeding, not think about the conditions in which they live and die, (not to mention the horrific working conditions of the humans on the "killing floor" of meat plants), and be released to think even less about their nature as creatures, because regardless of what we do to them we can now say "oh, but they don't *feel* the pain"?

Yes, the writer of the piece is an ethicist; yes, many would agree that this is literally "have your cake and eat it too." But really, this idea highlights for me the arrogance we have achieved as a species (at least those of us in the West), not to mention our severed relationship with ol' Mother Nature and the rest of her children. I wish I could go back to my childhood days of eating sausage from a pig we'd raised and fed and appreciated, a pig who had a good life. At least that was an honest relationship.