Hi Paul, I am absolutely with you in that I think factory farms are awful and would of course continue to be awful with the widespread use of analgesics. I fully support doing everything we can to eliminate them through some combination of developing alternative proteins and moving people and institutions toward eating the plant-based alternatives we already have. I in no way support mutilating animals even with analgesics. The reason I wrote this post is because I think it would be an improvement for animal welfare over the status quo of using no analgesics, and I think that this improvement is relatively achievable.
As a side note, my position has shifted a bit since I’ve written this based on new technological developments. I now think efforts in this domain should be more targeted toward adoption of drugs and genetic engineering that eliminate the need for the modifications in the first place. When I wrote this, those seemed a long way off but I no longer feel that way. But to be clear, even if we could completely eliminate all forms of direct mutilation that this post discusses I will still think factory farms are horrible.
Hi Paul, I am absolutely with you in that I think factory farms are awful and would of course continue to be awful with the widespread use of analgesics. I fully support doing everything we can to eliminate them through some combination of developing alternative proteins and moving people and institutions toward eating the plant-based alternatives we already have. I in no way support mutilating animals even with analgesics. The reason I wrote this post is because I think it would be an improvement for animal welfare over the status quo of using no analgesics, and I think that this improvement is relatively achievable.
As a side note, my position has shifted a bit since I’ve written this based on new technological developments. I now think efforts in this domain should be more targeted toward adoption of drugs and genetic engineering that eliminate the need for the modifications in the first place. When I wrote this, those seemed a long way off but I no longer feel that way. But to be clear, even if we could completely eliminate all forms of direct mutilation that this post discusses I will still think factory farms are horrible.