I suspect that in the long-term one unit of lab-grown animal (meat | dairy | X ) might be less cruel than some current methods for getting an equivalent unit, but I don’t know that it’s a certainty. Getting tissues and cells to make cloned meat often means working with butchered animals to begin with. And the lab work involved in the R&D is enormously wasteful in terms of resources. Maybe that initial outlay of suffering is then counter balanced by having a suffering-free (or suffering-reduced) food system, but what if there’s an ethical cost to manipulating animal in a way that essentially treats them (or their cells/tissues) as raw/inanimate inputs for industrial biotech/agricultural processes? There was recently a pretty nice project at the Royal College of Art proposing a vertical farm of chickens engineered to only have brain stems. I think it gets to the crux of the problem of treating animals as raw material to be engineered.
I suspect that in the long-term one unit of lab-grown animal (meat | dairy | X ) might be less cruel than some current methods for getting an equivalent unit, but I don’t know that it’s a certainty. Getting tissues and cells to make cloned meat often means working with butchered animals to begin with. And the lab work involved in the R&D is enormously wasteful in terms of resources. Maybe that initial outlay of suffering is then counter balanced by having a suffering-free (or suffering-reduced) food system, but what if there’s an ethical cost to manipulating animal in a way that essentially treats them (or their cells/tissues) as raw/inanimate inputs for industrial biotech/agricultural processes? There was recently a pretty nice project at the Royal College of Art proposing a vertical farm of chickens engineered to only have brain stems. I think it gets to the crux of the problem of treating animals as raw material to be engineered.