THE GREAT DIVIDE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 276

The secret longing of some vegans for Chickie Nobs came out into the open in 2008
when Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)
offered a $1 million prize to whoever can scale up stem cell techniques to grow edible
animal tissue for a mass market. The New York Times reported 'near civil war' within
PETA, with members leaving in protest. Jim Thomas, of the ETC group, picked up on the
licentiousness inherent in allowing vegans to eat synthetic meat: 'Culturing exotic meats
opens new markets: Anyone for lion? A panda burger? What about ethical human canni-
balism?' 37
But when PETA issued its challenge, veteran animal rights philosopher Peter Singer was
not slow to voice his support:
I always thought it would be a good thing, the same way that I think it's good that
the abuse of horses for pulling loads has ended. … I think it would be good if the ab-
use of animals for raising them for meat were to end, because we had a technological
solution to that. We had an alternative. 38
Singer's support for lab-cultured meat is a logical extension of his vegan philosophy,
which he states is based entirely on 'the principle of minimizing suffering'. 39 It is from this
basic principle that he arrives at his definition and denunciation of speciesism:
Just as human beings are speciesists in their readiness to cause pain to animals
when they would not cause a similar pain to humans for the same reason, so most hu-
man beings are speciesist in their readiness to kill other animals when they would not
kill human beings. 40
However, this philosophy was put to a closer test in 2009 when an academic philosopher
from the USA, Adam Shriver, proposed the genetic engineering of 'pain-free' meat - an
innovation that suggests that we could more easily engineer something like Chicki Nobs by
dumbing down the live chicken, rather than building them up from cultured meat. Whereas
Descartes postulated that animals were 'automata' who couldn't feel pain, in order to jus-
tify eating and mistreating them, Shriver proposes to manufacture automata for the same
purpose. In an article published in the journal Neuroethics , he wrote:
Though the vegetarian movement sparked by Peter Singer's book Animal Liber-
ation has achieved some success, there is more animal suffering caused today due to
factory farming than there was when the topic was originally written … We may be
very close to, if not already at, the point where we can genetically engineer factory-
farmed livestock with a reduced or completely eliminated capacity to suffer. In as