Good news for pigs. I’ll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.
Yeah but what are we gonna do with all these pigs then? Uplift them and invite them into our society?
That’s the fastest way to kill of even more animals and species as a whole. Pigs are really good at adapting and eating.
Slaughter them for one last time and spare their future generations by removing their lineage from existence. Nbd
That’s straight ignorance. You don’t abandon a curated breed of livestock based on some short term innovation. Humanity’s dependence on these types animals is older than recorded history. You would doom us all if the technology fails and we can not go back to traditional methods.
Someone has been reading Revelation Space.
I thought they were talking about Animal Farm
Animal reservoir? Instead of millions of pigs sent to the slaughter, thousands in free range zones where they can have their stem cells harvested without suffering. And “train” the rest to live on their original place.
Yeah, not a good idea. There are wild hogs, but our farm pigs are not good for the wild. They go feral and become giant and dangerous and do a lot of damage, and they also breed like crazy. It’s actually a really big issue. These animals are meant for the farm and nothing more.
This was definitely one of my concerns when I first went vegan, but thankfully, it’s really not a problem at all, due to basic supply and demand.
Everyone in the world isn’t going to go vegan overnight. The demand for animal products will gradually decline over decades, and farmers won’t waste their time and money by raising more animals than they can sell, so the supply will decline in turn.
Except for the pigs raised for stem cells? Which I think somehow is an even more distopian concept… Maybe just a different flavour.
Note: I am actually in the comments looking for the answer to my question “how many stem cells?”. Like per lb or whatever… What’s the ratio?
The article answers your question
It involves nothing more than pulling a single cell once from a pig without causing harm.
The whole “stem cells from a fetus” thing certain groups try to spread is false. Technically stems cells can come from a fetus, but they generally don’t. We even have methods to turn regular cells into stem cells I’m pretty sure. This doesn’t do anything more than taking cell(s) from a pig one time and they can be grown on their own potentially forever. No other pig needs to be involved.
