The Ethics of Genetic Engineering and the Futuristic Fate of Domestic Fowl

For thousands of years human beings have manipulated the bodies and family life of birds for their flesh, eggs, and other characteristics. The lives of birds have been disrupted for human convenience against their will. Twentieth-century critics of poultry factory farming often invoke traditional family farming as a humane alternative to modern poultry agriculture. They suggest that, ethically, we need to go back to old-fashioned animal husbandry.

Others dismiss the idea that the pre-factory farming era was idyllic for birds and other animals on the farm, suggesting, rather, that factory farming is an extension of age-old attitudes and customs in regard to animals raised for food. Recalling 16th-century England, Andrew Johnson says in Factory Farming, for example, that the modern battery-cage building is little more than a greatly magnified replica of the Renaissance housewife's kitchen hen coop.1

The genetic engineering of birds and other animals to produce food and practice science can thus be seen together with factory farming mainly as either a departure from tradition or an extension of it. Proponents argue that genetic engineering is "no different in principle from what happens when new hybrids or plant varieties are created through traditional breeding techniques."2

Others say that while humans have manipulated species for millennia, biotechnology, and in particular genetic engineering, "represents a quantum leap in species manipulation."3 This viewpoint is summarized by Jeremy Rifkin in his contrast between past and future: "In all of humanity's past experience, living things enjoyed a separate, unique, and identifiable place in the order of nature. There were always rabbits and robins, oaks and ostriches, and while human beings could tinker with the surface of each, they couldn't penetrate to the interior of any. . . . The redesign of existing organisms and the engineering of wholly new ones marks a qualitative break with humanity's entire past relationship to the living world. . . . Engineering new forms of life requires a wholesale transformation of our thought patterns."4

http://www.upc-online.org/genetic.html