How would you design a chicken? | Hacker News Reader

How would you design a chicken?

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20 pointsandygeers40 comments

I understand the interest in a novel kind of engineering, and this seems to be more of a thought exercise than anything else. I also understand that not everyone shares my views on animals, but this is such an awful exercise. This absurd mechanization of a living creature is just disgusting. Modern factory practices already deny animals of so many of their natural behaviors. This kind of thinking totally lacking in empathy and consequences scares the hell out of me.

I'm one of Hubbub's developers (the one who attached lasers), and just wanted to respond to this because I can completely understand the distaste you're feeling.

As you seem to realise, this is just an exercise in thinking "what if", I don't think anyone here would actually want to go ahead and make any of this happen, and we're definitely all very much against factory farming. Thats why we do what we do, giving independent butchers who genuinely care about the animals they raise a chance to compete with the big chains.

On the other hand, we could drastically improve the lives of farm animals if we engineered them more. For example, we could give them CIPA[1]. We could make their brains smaller. A vegetable chicken can't suffer. These modifications may sound perverse, but I doubt we're going to stop cooping these creatures up and killing them any time soon. We might as well do our best to reduce the amount of suffering we cause them.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_sensory_and_autonomi...

What you are proposing has been done already, well -- sort of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

You think factory farms are disturbing now? Just wait until animals cannot feel pain. I'm envisioning far more fights to the death for starters.

Painless death at the hands of other chickens sounds more moral than the current situation: a life of suffering followed by painful death at the hands of a machine. Of course if all chickens are born into a persistent vegetative state (or something close to it), I don't see how fights could happen. Also, farms where chickens kill each other would probably be less profitable than farms that slaughtered their chickens at the optimal time.

Painless animals were discussed on Overcoming Bias a few years ago: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/painless-meat.html . Interestingly, vegetarians were more likely to oppose painless animals than meat-eaters.

Well animals in a coma all of their lives will clearly not being killing each other. You're right about profits though which of course is the driving force behind all of this. There's also human safety to consider. Painless, larger animals would be quite dangerous.

Honestly, the driving force behind all of this is that we thought it was an interesting question which tells you about how people view food. My favourite answer so far has been "Don't redesign the chicken, redesign society to better use it."

What if the new chicken is hard-coded with a set of natural behaviors that are more conducive to food factory use?

For what purpose are we designing the chicken?

If we're designing it as a food animal, I'd maximize the meat area and try to minimize the rest. I'd reduce the amount of body fat naturally carried. If possible, I'd take a page from "Top Secret"[1] and make the bird perform photosynthesis.

If we're designing a good prey, I'd make it smaller and give it better wings for flight.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Top-Secret-John-Reynolds-Gardiner/prod...

Is very low fat necessarily optimal? I think excessively fatty birds are a problem, but depending on use, I suspect a non-zero percentage of fat is desirable. Though I have no idea what the optimal amount would be. But in plenty of food applications, grease is good.

If anything, you'd want a chicken with skin which excretes fat so you can avoid putting butter on it, although that would make it quite a bit more difficult to catch.

self-buttering chicken makes me drool at my desk. Would that make it a cow-chicken hybrid though (assuming it's butter from cow's milk anyway)

I would like chicken to have a programming interface so I could write automated scripts. For example, if an event is sensed that an egg is coming, then walk to my boiler and tweet. By tweet, I mean tweet like a chicken, or if you like, tweet like a chicken and tweet through the Internet.

The internet of animals?

No, THE INTERNET. I mean post to twitter...

similar to the internet of things...

There's no point in redesigning the chicken, because we already have quite a few kinds. And yes, they are already optimized through primitive genetic engineering techniques for various characteristics useful to humans: early maturity, large breast size, egg production speed, taste (or lack thereof) and so forth... not all in the same variety, of course.

Diversity builds resilience. When the genome development environments go online, I recommend that we open source the chicken and let a million variants cluck. Now, BSD, MPL or GPL?

Spin the chicken in a centrifuge so that it lives in 2.5G and develops far more muscles:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13318124.900-review-sp...

Stackable, of course: http://mydailycow.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/far_side_cows....

"How would you avoid the impeding PETA backlash" is another good question...

I'd be more worried about the impending backlash from God.

Don't worry about it - nothing been said so far.

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/photos/12...

If it's going to be of any help for world domination, or at least in serving as a good guard chicken, it'll need the personality of a goose, the fangs and venom sacs of a deadly snake and the talons of an eagle. Something will have to be done to make it sound more intimidating as well, so we should add a rattle on its tail. Oh, and unlike a regular chicken, the wings should be functional in order to control the skies. Behold the fully-realized rattle-chicken.

This prompts some interesting questions. Could you design a brainless chicken or one with just enough brains to eat, breathe and lay eggs? And would that be more or less horrible compared to the way chickens are currently being treated in factories? Where's the line between vat grown meat and brainless chickens?

> Could you design a brainless chicken or one with just enough brains to eat, breathe and lay eggs?

Yes, it's called a chicken.

Actually, chickens are pretty intelligent and social creatures[1].

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken#Social_behaviour

>> Could you design a brainless chicken or one with just enough brains to eat, breathe and lay eggs? >Yes, it's called a chicken.

Oh yea, that's right. I forgot that chickens exhibit no social interactions and are incapable of learning. Good thing they also are incapable of pain, distress, and enjoyment of anything.

More accident than design but there was Mike the headless chicken: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

Simple, you have two versions of the chicken - one optimized for eggs and one for meat.

As an extension to the meat chicken I would like to see extra re-generating legs, a bit like how lizards loss and regrow their tails through autotomy.

They would come with their own super-oven, so you press a switch and they self-cook in 2 seconds. Pooof!

At least the meat problem is already solved: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/07/...

As for eggs, for baking they can easily be replaced.

It's more difficult if you want to replace scrambled eggs or similar. I have tried the vegg [1], but have not been very impressed.

And I just googled and found out that apparently in China there is a food scandal where they produce fake eggs [2]. Obviously they design them for profit and not as a replacement for vegans or even a healthy, cheaper alternative. But it seems that it could be done.

[1] http://www.thevegg.com/ [2] http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/06/how-to-make-a-rotten-egg...

Screw redesign. Why not turn the chicken into a raptor-like dinosaur?

http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_building_a_dinosaur_fro...

Obviously they should be cube shaped, to facilitate more efficient shipping.

If you ever played the old game HyperBlade, it had it game ads about GE chickens. IIRC, they were boneless and bun shaped.

I expected growing meat and eggs from cell cultures.

I wonder how long until GM hackers can prototype their new chicken design.

I think I saw in Food Inc. that chickens have been bread to have enormous breasts to serve the market demands. Same goes for basically all fruits and vegetables, raised and modified for unnaturally large sizes.

For some bizarre reason, this reminds me of the human centipede.

Start with the egg

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