It seems that the habit of killing living beings and then eating them has no limits. You might think that the hundreds of millions of animals that are slaughtered in the UK every year are enough to prepare a variety of food delights for anyone, but some people are never satisfied with what they have and are always looking for something new for their feasts.
Over time, more and more exotic animals appear on restaurant menus. Now you can already see ostriches, emus, quails, alligators, kangaroos, guinea fowls, bison and even deer there. Soon there will be everything that can walk, crawl, jump or fly. One by one, we take animals from the wild and cage them. Creatures such as ostriches, which live in family colonies and run freely on the African prairie, are herded into small, dirty barns in cold Britain.
From the moment people decide they can eat a particular animal, change begins. Suddenly everyone becomes interested in the life of an animal – how and where it lives, what it eats, how it reproduces and how it dies. And every change is for the worse. The end result of human intervention is usually an unfortunate creature, natural instincts, which people have tried to drown out and destroy. We are changing animals so much that eventually they can’t even reproduce without the help of humans.
The ability of scientists to change animals is growing every day. With the help of the latest technical developments – genetic engineering, our power has no limits, we can do everything. Genetic engineering deals with changes in the biological system, both animal and human. When you look at the human body, it may seem strange that it is an ordered whole system, but in fact it is. Every freckle, every mole, height, eye and hair color, number of fingers and toes, all part of a very complex pattern. (I hope this is clear. When a construction team comes to a piece of land to build a skyscraper, they don’t say, “You start in that corner, we’ll build here, and we’ll see what happens.” They have projects where everything has been worked out before the last screw.) Similarly, with animals. Except that for every animal there is not one plan or project, but millions.
Animals (and humans too) are made up of hundreds of millions of cells, and at the center of each cell is a nucleus. Each nucleus contains a DNA molecule (deoxyribonucleic acid) that carries information about genes. They are the very plan for creating a certain body. It is theoretically possible to grow an animal from a single cell so small it can’t even be seen with the naked eye. As you know, every child begins to grow from the cell that occurs when a sperm fertilizes an egg. This cell consists of a mixture of genes, half of which belongs to the mother’s egg, and the other half to the father’s sperm. The cell begins to divide and grow, and the genes are responsible for the appearance of the unborn child – the shape and size of the body, even for the rate of growth and development.
Again, it is theoretically possible to mix the genes of one animal and the genes of another to produce something in between. Already in 1984, scientists at the Institute of Animal Physiology, in the UK, could create something between a goat and a sheep. However, it is easier to take small segments of DNA or one gene from one animal or plant and add them to another animal or plant. Such a procedure is done at the very beginning of the origin of life, when the animal is still not much larger than a fertilized egg, and as it grows, the new gene becomes part of this animal and gradually changes it. This process of genetic engineering has become a real business.
Huge international campaigns are spending billions of pounds on research in this area, mostly to develop new types of food. First “genetically modified foods” are starting to appear in stores around the world. In 1996, approval was given in the UK for the sale of tomato puree, rapeseed oil and bread yeast, all genetically engineered products. It’s not just UK stores that need to provide information about which foods have been genetically modified. So, theoretically, you can buy a pizza that contains all three of the above nutritional components, and you will never know about it.
You also don’t know if animals had to suffer so that you could eat what you want. In the course of genetic research for the production of meat, some animals have to suffer, believe me. One of the first known catastrophes of genetic engineering was an unfortunate creature in America called the Beltsville pig. It was supposed to be a super meat pig, in order for it to grow faster and be fatter, scientists introduced a human growth gene into its DNA. And they raised a big pig, constantly in pain. The Beltsville pig had chronic arthritis in its limbs and could only crawl when it wanted to walk. She could not stand and spent most of her time lying down, suffering from a large number of other illnesses.
This is the only clear experimental disaster that scientists have allowed the public to see, other pigs were involved in this experiment, but they were in such a disgusting state that they were kept behind closed doors. ОHowever, the Beltsville pig lesson did not stop the experiments. At the moment, genetic scientists have created a super mouse, twice the size of an ordinary rodent. This mouse was created by inserting a human gene into the mouse’s DNA, which led to the rapid growth of cancer cells.
Now scientists are doing the same experiments on pigs, but since people don’t want to eat meat that contains the cancer gene, the gene has been renamed the “growth gene.” In the case of the Belgian blue cow, genetic engineers found a gene responsible for increasing muscle mass and doubled it, thus producing larger calves. Unfortunately, there is another side, cows born from this experiment have thinner thighs and a narrower pelvis than a normal cow. It’s not hard to understand what’s going on. A larger calf and a narrow birth canal make childbirth much more painful for the cow. Basically, cows that have undergone genetic changes are not able to give birth at all. The solution to the problem is a caesarean section.
This operation can be performed every year, sometimes for every birth and every time the cow is cut open this procedure becomes more and more painful. In the end, the knife cuts not ordinary skin, but tissue, consisting of scars that take longer and harder to heal.
We know that when a woman undergoes repeated caesarean sections (thankfully, this does not happen very often), it becomes an excruciatingly painful operation. Even scientists and veterinarians agree that the Belgian blue cow is in severe pain – but the experiments continue. Even stranger experiments were carried out on Swiss brown cows. It turned out that these cows have a genetic defect that causes the development of a special brain disease in these animals. But oddly enough, when this disease begins, cows give more milk. When scientists discovered the gene that caused the disease, they did not use new data to cure it – they were convinced that if the cow suffered from the disease, she would produce more milk.. Terrible, isn’t it?
In Israel, scientists have discovered in chickens a gene responsible for the absence of feathers on the neck and a gene responsible for their presence. By conducting various experiments with these two genes, scientists have bred a bird that has almost no feathers. The few feathers that these birds have do not even protect the body. For what? So that producers can raise birds in the Negev desert, under the rays of the scorching sun, where the temperature reaches 45C.
What other entertainment is in store? Some of the projects I’ve heard about include research to breed hairless pigs, experiments to breed wingless hatchery hens to fit more hens in a cage, and work to breed asexual cattle, and so on. the same vegetables with fish genes.
Scientists insist on the safety of this kind of change in nature. However, in the body of such a large animal as a pig contains millions of genes, and scientists have studied only about a hundred of them. When a gene is changed or a gene from another animal is introduced, it is not known how the other genes of the organism will react, one can only put forward hypotheses. And no one can say how soon the consequences of such changes will be visible. (It’s like our fictional builders swapping steel for wood because it looks better. It may or may not hold the building!)
Other scientists have made some alarming predictions about where this new science might lead. Some say that genetic engineering could create entirely new diseases against which we are not immune. Where genetic engineering has been used to change insect species, there is a risk that new parasite species may emerge that cannot be controlled.
International companies are responsible for conducting this kind of research. It is said that as a result we will have fresher, tastier, more varied and maybe even cheaper food. Some even argue that it will be possible to feed all the people dying of hunger. This is just an excuse.
In 1995, a World Health Organization report showed that there is already enough food to feed all people on the planet, and that for one reason or another, economic and political reasons, people do not get enough food. There are no guarantees that the money invested in the development of genetic engineering will be used for anything other than profit. Genetic engineering products, which we will not get soon, can lead to a real disaster, but one thing we already know is that animals are already suffering because of the desire of people to produce as much cheap meat as possible.