FUTURE IMPERIUM: The futuristic fate of birds and the other earthlings

Genetic engineering furthers a drive in the human species to eliminate not only diversity and autonomy, but joy and happiness in other creatures, even as we proceed to extinguish, massacre, incarcerate, and invasively manipulate the remaining wild birds and other free-living beings on earth.

KAREN DAVIS: Ethical protest against the genetic engineering of birds and other animals has focused primarily on the violation of species integrity, although attention has also been paid to the suffering of individual animals, and a moral repugnance has been shown against defining animals as patentable “manufactures.” This definition represents a further debasement of nonhuman animals from their traditional low status as property lacking value and claims in their own right.

Animals used in genetic engineering are further degraded in not even being recognized as whole beings but only as embodiments of certain DNA sequences, genetic resources, model systems, production traits, and body parts.

Reduction of chickens and other animals to model disease and food production traits is not new. Researchers have developed and maintained highly inbred flocks of chickens over many decades… In animal agriculture, the fitness of an animal has historically been determined by whether the animal pleased “its” (his or her) owner enough to be allowed to survive to maturity and reproduce.

Genetic engineering carries these attitudes and practices further in line with a past in which nonhuman animals have repeatedly been denied possession of a soul, reason, consciousness or some other vaunted human trait, and used without compassion or apology…

Today, environmentalists confer a relatively high and “respectful” status on free-living animals, who may then be hunted and otherwise “honored” with violence. Most often, it isn’t the individual animal who is “honored,” but rather the Category: not the bear but THE BEAR although, of course, it is the actual flesh and blood animal who is hunted and forced to bear the burden of being brutally “honored” and eaten as a specimen of that animal’s Category.

By contrast, domesticated animals, particularly farmed animals, have been castigated by environmentalists for “allowing” themselves to be domesticated, thereby placing themselves outside the circle of moral consideration. Farmed animals have, in effect, been blamed for allowing themselves to be turned into “genetic freaks” and degenerate parodies of nature. Factory-farmed animals have been further denounced for messing up the natural environment with their mounds of dead bodies and manure, unsightliness, diseases and pollution. Just recently, an animal advocacy website blamed “chickenshit” for spreading avian influenza. How does this language encourage public respect for these most thoroughly abused birds?…

Farmed animals have been morally abandoned by our culture, our species, and treated with contempt and neglect, even on occasion by their so-called defenders. They have been dismissed as beyond the pale of equal, or even any, moral concern, although, morally, we owe more, not less, to the beings whose earthrights and birthrights we have so thoroughly stripped away.

The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), in which inanimate machines monitor and manipulate sentient “machines,” puts chickens and other farmed animals into ever deeper pits of human depravity and animal agony. As noted in an April 2023 article in Noema Magazine: “The use of AI in factory farms will, in the long run, increase the already huge number of animals who suffer in terrible conditions”…

Overall, I fear that chickens and other domesticated birds do not have a future worth living with the human species and that genetic engineering furthers a drive in our species to eliminate not only diversity and autonomy, but joy and happiness in other creatures, even as we proceed to extinguish, massacre, incarcerate, and invasively manipulate the remaining wild birds and other free-living beings on earth…

I think it is essentially true, as someone wrote, that “If there’s anything to reincarnation and a recycling of souls, with the decreasing biodiversity on this planet and daily loss of endangered species, the only place one will be able to go if they get recycled into another lifetime is into another human or a farmed animal.”

This vision portends the fate of earth’s other inhabitants as long as we continue down the road we have taken. All the omens are ominous…

Animal advocacy author and activist, Roberta Kalechofsky, notes in her book Animal Suffering and The Holocaust (2003), that “most human beings everywhere are indifferent to the hideous suffering of the animal world, most of which is not inflicted by nature ‘red in tooth and claw,’ but by humans themselves.” Even if most people acknowledged the truth of this statement, how many would actually care, and quit the carnage? SOURCE…

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