Dis/integrating animals: ethical dimensions of the genetic engineering of animals for human consumption |
| |
Authors: | Traci Warkentin |
| |
Affiliation: | (1) Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 109 HNES, 4700 Keele St, Toronto, Canada, M3J 1P3 |
| |
Abstract: | Research at the intersections of feminism, biology and philosophy provides dynamic starting grounds for this discussion of
genetic technologies and animals. With a focus on animal bodies, I will examine moral implications of the genetic engineering
of “domesticated” animals—primarily pigs and chickens—for the purposes of human consumption. Concepts of natural and artificial,
contamination and purity, integrity and fragmentation and mind and body will feature in the discussion. In this respect, Margaret
Atwood’s novel, Oryx and Crake, serves as a cogent medium for exploring these highly contentious practices and ideas as it provides hypothetical narratives
of possibility. Moreover, it is used to highlight contemporary hegemonic assumptions and values in ways that make them visible.
Particular attention is paid to issues of growing human organs in pigs for xenotransplantation (resulting, for Atwood, in
“pigoons”) and the ultimate end of the intensive factory farming of chickens through the genetic engineering of ‘mindless’
chicken tumours (or, as Atwood calls them, “ChickieNobs”). Integral to these philosophical considerations is the provocative
question of the genetic modification of animal bodies as a means to end the suffering of domestic food animals. The ultimate
implications of this question include an ongoing sensory and moral deprivation of human experience, potentially resulting
in a future mechanomophosis, the extreme manifestation of an existing mechanomorphism.
|
| |
Keywords: | Animal ethics Genetic engineering Mechanomorphosis Oryx and Crake Speculative/science fiction Transgenic organisms |
本文献已被 SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|