Animal rights and Animals wronged

    Traditionally people have attached a great deal of emotional and cultural significance to animals. The tendency of modern science, agriculture and biotechnology to look upon animals as utilitarian objects that can be modified and manipulated for our purposes flies in the face of deep-rooted trends in human thought. Thus, one issue brought into sharp focus by biotechnology, is the fundamental question of how we see animals: are they culturally significant beings evoking respect and veneration? or fellow mortals evoking affection and sympathy? or natural objects that we can rightly modify and manipulate for our own ends?

     Moral disquiet over genetic tampering with animals raises another deeply rooted cultural issue. Some of the traditional Middle Eastern food taboos reflect an animal classification system whereby animals that fall outside the system are seen as suspect. Today most Western people do not use that same biological classification system, but we do have certain categories that shape our perception of the animal world. These come from sources such as children's literature, religious ideas about the natural order, or the idea of evolution as having given rise to distinct "species" of animals. The creation of transgenic animals involves a perceptual shift, whereby we come to view animals not as distinct types, but as constituted by a vast number of genes that can be removed from one species and inserted into another. But this geneticist's view of animals may not be shared by other citizens. If citizens do not share the geneticist's view of animals, then the creation of transgenic animals may be culturally inappropriate, in much the same way that high-tech agriculture is culturally inappropriate in certain parts of the world. Alternatively, perhaps lay people in the West have accepted the modern geneticists' view of animals sufficiently to eliminate any inherent moral qualms about transgenic technology.

     Suppose that citizens are not troubled by the issue raised above and they accept the utilitarian view whereby animals can be manipulated for human purposes, and they are comfortable with a view of species that allows us to insert new genes in order to change their properties. We then encounter the four more conventional concerns that have been raised about food biotechnology: food safety, environmental impact, animal welfare, and social justice.

     Animal welfare concerns can (and should) be viewed as an extension of social justice concerns. From a social justice viewpoint we may ask whether a certain technology will benefit, say, technologically sophisticated dairy producers, to the detriment of smaller, more traditional dairy producers and the local communities that depend on them. Concerns about animal welfare extend this type of thinking to include animals: will the changes caused by biotechnology bring benefits to farmers, consumers, and purveyors of biotechnology products, but to the detriment of the animals themselves?

     Two specific animal welfare concerns have been raised about biotechnology. The first involves deleterious pleiotropic effects of foreign genes in animals such as the Beltsville pigs. As one transgenic specialist noted, science will “crash and burn” many times on the way to successful production of transgenic animals; as one animal protectionist retorted, it is the genetically modified animals that will “crash and burn”. A second concern involves increased incidence of health problems that may result from the use of products of biotechnology on animals, such as the use of BST with dairy cattle. In refusing to register BST, Health Canada noted that the product does not produce new disease states, but rather appears to increase the incidence of mastitis and lameness -- problems that were already being caused by conventional breeding and management for high yields. As both of these examples show, the animal welfare issues raised by biotechnology are rarely new issues.