this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Good news for pigs. I'll be delighted to see factory farming disappear and be replaced by tech like this.
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.
Thank you. I read the article, I swear, before posting. (Literally stopped what I was typing after I read my own statement "looking in the comments") Not sure how I missed that.
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.
Yeah but what are we gonna do with all these pigs then? Uplift them and invite them into our society?
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.
Oh, poor little humans, imagine having to live by *checks notes* eating vegetables.
Oh, the humanity!
And meat is by far not the only thing we cultivate pigs for.
Sorry chief, I'm unable to fathom the logic underlying this comment.
Do you think that the day the first stem cell sausage hits the supermarket shelves pigs will be deleted from this reality?
You'll still be able to buy sausages made with real flesh in 50 years, just that between now and then alternatives will emerge that are tastier, healthier, and cheaper.
Steam trains still exist but you don't drive one to work every day because they're shit.
I was responding to a post advocating for letting the breed die out. Just. Look. Up. I geuss?
That's not what that comment says.
We could let the pigs run the farm, then document what happens.
They did already heress the document
I had heard of this story many times before, but had never actually read it. Thanks.
You could even write a book about that!
Eat the last generation and put a couple in zoos, like we did with all species once they are no longer useful...
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.
We can keep them as cute animals :3
Someone has been reading Revelation Space.
I thought they were talking about Animal Farm
They still need the pigs to cultivate the cells to make the sausage.
No.
They need one cell, once.
They can than grow that one cell into an infinite number of cells.
Release them into the wild
Nah. We got people in helicopters shooting them by the hundreds and they are still out of control.
That’s the fastest way to kill of even more animals and species as a whole. Pigs are really good at adapting and eating.
Yeah, it’s not a good idea
Imagine how that moment would look on The Simpsons. Imagine Lisa hitting the button to free them all
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.
Their original place is farms.