Maybe there's a way to chemically destroy part of their brain at birth, while using their body to grow meat tissue?

Some ethicist should come up with an electronic controller that keeps the chickens or whatever alive by stimulating neurons like the brain would, but which clearly has no consciousness attached.

Actually, this entire business of needing a whole chicken to make chicken meat seems inefficient. I wonder if there's a way to grow meat tissue like you would algae?

Is in-vitro human meat considered cannibalism? What if the meat is synthesized from your own DNA? Self-cannibalism? Not asking you directly, just throwing the thought tangent out there

Thank you. I've been wondering if something like this would become viable before 3d printing meat. I didn't know it was already a thing.

In-vitro meat is looking like a more viable option by the day. And it has the obvious moral ground.

Forget moral high ground. It's energy efficient. You don't have to feed whole animal and then cut away stuff you don't like or can't eat. Just grow the thing you need.

Plus you only need a couple of animals for breeding/cell harvest.

It also will have both a medical and commercial high ground.

If you don't have all of the nasty digestion bits of a bird, you lost a lot of the nasty disease bits.

If you only have the meat parts of the bird, you don't waste any growth resources on non-saleable parts of the bird.

In vitro meat would be great. Yet you still need to introduce a small number of pathogens to improve your fitness (your body needs to fight small battles all the time to keep in the top shape). Sanitized stuff brings you allergy and other fun, like inability to adapt to changing environment.

Should be solvable by frequently swapping out the cell sources for the breeding, using fresh samples from live farm animals (tested for harmful pathogens first, of course).

In-vitro meat has a huge environmental advantage as well.

> Some ethicist should come up with an electronic controller that keeps the chickens or whatever alive by stimulating neurons like the brain would, but which clearly has no consciousness attached.

We could call it a "brain".

There is a certain disturbing factor of enjoying the practice of actively harming another individual. But from a view of amount of harm done, you're absolutely right. The scale of our atrocities towards animals is enormous.

I believe in the West most people don't even want to think about it.

Seriously? I think people in the west generally care more about animal welfare than in the far east. The UK has the highest animal welfare standards in the world. Sure there are people, farmers and pet keepers that do not obey the law, but in the main animals are very well taken care of.

A large majority of Indians are vegetarians and the rest only eat fish, chicken or goat. Cows are holy and worshiped!

Euthanasing animals in India, or at least some parts, is illegal because they believe they can not kill animals, therefore many, if not most animals in India die terrible deaths in old age. I am not confident that chickens, goats, nor many other animals in India are well treated and have good quality of lives.

It certainly is not that case that just because you do not consume animals means you keep them in humane conditions.

Compared to whom? China? Where they kill endangered pangolins so they can grind-up their scales and sprinkle it on their dicks because some moron centuries ago said it was an aphrodisiac?

Get real.

He said most people, just looking at McDonald's popularity alone, maybe an indication of how interested most people are in understanding the sources of their food.