Disturbing stuff
So I was reading in the Dairy Farmers' Annual that research in States has shown that hormone treatments can induce the onset of lactation without the whole messy calving thing. It is not yet FDA approved, but that it should give farmers pause for thought. Thinking individuals not directly involved in the business of degrading cows too.
Now the idea is appalling, but I am confused at just what sort of appalling it is.
There is the whole hormones in our milk thing, which personally doesn't get me too riled up. Sure food safety is an issue but it is way down on my list of awful things to worry about. I believe that the preoccupation of many "environmentalists" with it is just another self-indulgent consumerist fad. Wake up and smell the anthropocentrism people, you are NOT the victims here.
So back to appallingness,
Starting from the point of view that the dairy industry as it is now conducted, ie intensive high intervention 'scientific' factory farming (even with grassy hills) is at best ethically questionable, at worst just plain evil, does this new appallingness make it better or worse?
My immediate thought was that the idea of totally messing with the cows' physiology to induce permanent lactation and making the whole thing more artificial, obviously wrong. I am rethinking that though.
I mean they are hardly unmessed around with as it is. The whole business of calving is far from natural, artificial insemination and inductions and all. And it is not like they get to keep their calves and feed them.
Given that a dairy cow's lot is a nasty one, would it actually be made worse by avoiding all that?
I don't get misty eyed about motherhood, I have made an intellectual decision to be above biology, but it is pretty fundamental to the experience of being a female mammal. Farm animals' experience of it has been totally hi-jacked and perverted by human beings, this just takes it one step further. While that seems wrong in itself, there is something in me that leans towards a Utilitarian view of the matter that it might actually result in less suffering.
Which is a new kind of appallingness, the seductive lure of means/ends thinking, campaigning for the ethical treatment of slaves rather than their liberation and ideas that more technology is the answer to the problem of technology.
Sins of a most appalling kind.
I must go examine my conscience for more signs of backsliding.