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Comment by AngryParsley | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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."

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