C. Food producers have no moral obligation to label genetically engineered foods.

Or

A. The rational plan of nature was established by God at the point of creation (Assume that evolution is included as part of God's plan).
B. Genetic Engineering constitutes changing God's rational plan.

C. God fearing men and women should abide by God's will and refuse to eat all food that falls outside this plan.

D. Food producers have a moral obligation to label all genetically engineered foods.

FOUR CASES BY GARY VARNER

1. The Vegetarian Meal Plan

A professor at a major state university has received federal funding for a program on ethics which life sciences professors from around the country will attend. The professor is a vegetarian on moral grounds. In making arrangements for the five-day program, he specifies that all of the (optional) lunches will be lacto-ovo vegetarian. Several of the participants are outraged. In fact, one sends a long, angry email message to professors across the country and to highly placed personnel in federal funding organizations, including the National Science Foundation, which funded the program.

QUESTIONS:

1. Why do you think some of the participants were outraged?

2. Was the professor wrong to design the lunches this way? Should funding for future programs be rescinded because of the meal plan?

3. Suppose the professor in question had believed, on moral grounds, that every meal should include some broccoli and he had insisted that the lunches all do so. Would this have angered participants? What if the professor believed, on moral grounds, that people should consume some animal flesh at each meal and had designed the menus accordingly?

2. Farm Animals: Some Specific Management Cases

Note: The following cases, which each involve relatively specific management issues in farm animal welfare in the United States, are all based on information in Bernard Rollin's Farm Animal Welfare: Social, Bioethical, and Research Issues (Iowa State University Press, 1995).

Case #1: On p. 11 Rollin quotes the following moral dilenirna from the Canadian Veterinary Journal: "You (as a veterinarian) are called to a 500-sow farrow-to-finish swine operation to examine a problem with vaginal discharges in sows. There are three full-time employees and one manager overseeing approximately 5000 animals. As you examine several sows in the crated gestation unit, you notice one with a hind leg at an unusual angle and inquire about her status. You are told 'She broke her leg yesterday and she's due to farrow next week. We'll let her farrow in here and then we'll shoot her and foster off the pigs'."

Then Rollin writes: "Before commenting on this case, I spoke to the veterinarian who had experienced this incident, a swine practitioner. He explained that such operations run on tiny profit margins and minimal labor. Thus, even when he offered to splint the leg at cost, he was told that the operation could not afford the manpower entailed by separating this sow and caring for her..."

Question: Should immediate euthanization of such animals be required by law? Why or why not?

Case #2:

Polling, or de-horning, is an issue on both range and feedlot beef operations and on dairy farms. Cattle with horns are more difficult to handle safely, they require more room in transportation and confinement systems, and the presence of horns can exacerbate problems associated with dominance hierarchies.

Dehorning is done several ways: by treatment, at a very early age, with a caustic chemical, which causes some irritation; by burning the horn bud with a hot iron, also when the calf is quite young, which causes pain because the interior of the horn is innervated; and using a " dehoming spoon," which levers the horn out of the skull, a procedure which becomes increasingly painful and bloody as the calf ages. Cattle with the poll (hornfree) gene are born homless, so it would be possible to breed cattle to have no horns. However, a dairy and reproduction specialist estimates that introducing the poll gene while preserving other superior traits in Holsteins (a common dairy breed) would raise the price of milk 4% or 5%.

Questions: Is solving the animal welfare problems associated with de-homing worth a 4%-5% rise in the cost of milk? What if a number of other animal welfare problems could each be solved at similar cost, with the aggregate rise in cost associated with virtually eliminating problems involved in management, housing, transportation, and slaughter all being solved for a 50% rise in the cost of meat and animal byproducts? Would an ideally humane animal agriculture be worth that? If so, should the changes be mandated and how should the transition be phased in?

Case #3:

Kosher slaughter rules prohibit stunning the animals before slitting their throats. Studies show that in animals "stunned" with the captive bolt pistols used in almost all contemporary slaughter plants, loss of visual and somatosensory evoked response is immediate and irreversible, and loss of spontaneous cortical activity occurs within 10 seconds.

In kosher slaughtered animals, by contrast, loss of evoked responses takes between 20 and 126 seconds with a mean of 77 for somatosensory responses and a mean of 55 for visual responses. Loss of spontaneous cortical activity in kosher slaughtered animals takes between 19 and 113 seconds with a mean of 75 seconds after cutting.

Questions: Some countries (e.g. New Zealand) have banned slaughter without stunning. Should the United States? Would such a ban interfere with the free exercise of religion? If so, is this a sufficient reason not to ban it?

Case #4:

Tight confinement of sows is recognized as the major welfare issue in swine management. Feral swine develop complex social relations and spend as much as half their time rooting. However, state of the art swine operations today confine sows continuously, in gestation crates small enough that the animals cannot turn around, and then, after parturition, in farrowing crates of approximately the same size. The latter are claimed to be justified in terms of reducing piglet mortality, since sows commonly crush small piglets, and the former allow large numbers of animals to be housed in climate-controlled conditions.

Questions: Should continuous confinement of sows be prohibited by law? Should farrowing crates be outlawed? Should access to straw or other rooting material be required?

2. Farm Animals: Some General Practices

Note: Information for the following cases, which each involve general animal husbandry practices in the United States, was drawn from Bernard Rollin's Farm Animal Welfare: Social, Bioethical, and Research Issues (Iowa State University Press, 1995) and from Gary E. Varner, "What's Wrong With Animal By-products?" Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 7 (1994), pp. 7-17.

Case #l:

Approximately 30 million cattle are slaughtered yearly in the United States. When it comes to.the slaughter procedure itself, the large-scale, state-of-the-art facilities capable of slaughtering as many as 400 or 600 animals per hour are, perhaps contrary to popular belief, the most humane. The races approaching the stunning chute can be designed to look just like those through which cattle have traveled previously for routine veterinary care, experienced handlers can move animals along without prodding, cattle do not "smell blood in the chutes," and "stunning" is a misnomer for what happens in the kill chute, since a properly placed shot with a "stun gun" obliterates the animal's brain, making it impossible to regain consciousness.

Case #2:

On average, milking cows spend between three and four years in production, after which they are slaughtered for relatively low-grade beef. Dairy farmers maintain high productivity by breeding cows to calve about yearly. The calves are removed from their mothers immediately or within days, with most of the female calves becoming replacement milk cows and almost all of the male calves being raised for veal. Statistics indicate that about one seventh of the cattle slaughtered yearly are from dairy herds.

Gary Varner Continued...