Friday 29 January 2010

Animal Ethics update

I have been hearing quite a lot about the meat that is being grown in labs recently.  There have been textile and food rumblings about this for a few years (growing your own leather jacket for example, BBC article about meat from 2005), however the latest thing that I read is that the science involves taking cells from the muscle of a living animal and then growing it in a solution of blood from animal foetuses - if this is an accurate explanation of the process then another ethical question arises here.  Can it be considered ethical to grow meat like this?  I don't like to pit one stance against another like this usually but here goes - is it more or less ethical to eat grown meat than to eat farmed meat?  And thus the questions comes - is it more or less ethical to wear grown leather than farmed leather?  Feasibly leather as a meat-industry by-product could become sparse if we  eat more grown meat, could this lead to demand for grown leather? 


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6936352.ece

No comments:

Post a Comment