A friend at dinner asked me why EAs aren’t working on breeding chickens (and other farm animals) to be less intelligent as a way to reduce the suffering caused by factory farming. I was embarrassed that I didn’t have a good response for him. Some questions I had about this idea:
Is selective breeding capable of meaningfully changing an animal’s capacity to suffer? Domestic animals have brains that are 15-35% smaller than their wild counterparts, so there is some interaction between domestication and intelligence.
Is anyone working on genetic engineering or gene drives to make farm animals less able to suffer?
Is this a hedge against clean meat? This strategy would be unnecessary if clean meat is successful, but it may be more tractable. Also, a small proportion of people may refuse to switch to clean meat even when it is widely available, and we can minimise their negative impact by breeding farm animals with minimal capacity to suffer.
Has anyone looked into this? Am I going crazy?
Based on the content of your question, it seems that you are asking about ways to make farmed animals less capable of suffering, rather than (as the title suggests) to make chickens less intelligent. This has been discussed before; see e.g.
Shriver, Adam (2009) Knocking out pain in livestock: Can technology succeed where morality has stalled?, Neuroethics, vol. 2, pp. 115–124.
Shriver, Adam & Emilie McConnachie (2018) Genetically modifying livestock for improved welfare: a path forward, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, vol. 31, pp. 161–180.
Shulman, Carl (2012) Breeding happier livestock: no futuristic tech required, Overcoming Bias, December 6.
I’ve never heard anyone claim an association of congenital analgesia and reduced intelligence, it seems to me this entire idea is based in the ableist Idea that someones moral worth is tied to there intelligence rather than there capacity for suffering or pleasure
You are factually correct, but
I don’t think the OP is too far off, in that, e.g., capacity for pain and intelligence can both be caused by a common factor. So e.g., lobotomizing chickens (or breeding them to be essentially lobotomized from birth) would presumably reduce both intelligence and capacity to feel pain.
The OP did the right thing here by being confused/encountering an interesting idea, and presenting that idea in the forum for further consideration.
I agree. It seems unfair to me to say it’s ableist.
I think the core idea of your comment—that intelligence is not equal to capacity to suffer, and the OP imprecisely conflates the two—is true and important. I had that same thought while reading the OP. But I suspect your comment would have received less (strong) disapproval if you had stated your point in a less adversarial/politically charged way.
I’m not sure this was intended but the ideas of “congenital analgesia” and “lobotomy” that are presented in this comment chain seem difficult to implement for practical reasons.
Also, analgesia, just the inability to feel physical pain, probably isn’t enough to guarantee welfare. This is because animals probably suffer in other ways (lack of access to well understood needs such as perches or nest boxes, avoiding aggression, movement, intense boredom or frustration).
It is possible that solutions that could work does look like reduced intelligence, and that might motivate the title the of the post. The idea is that someone who is doped up on painkillers will have both dulled senses and reduced executive function.
Yes, “lobotomy” was just meant to be an illustrative example.