Woodhouse believes the average human being simply will not change his dietary practices to end animal cruelty, no matter how much we attempt to educate them. Most of his hope lies, instead, in lab-grown meat.
WAYNE HSIUNG: Leighton Woodhouse is a dedicated animal rights supporter. He’s covered some of the most important issues relating to the movement in the past decade, from so-called ag-gag laws, which make it a crime to take photographs in factory farms, to the rising use of civil disobedience to bring attention to animal abuse. To this day, one of my favorite all-time videos on animal rights is a profile Leighton did of Priya Sawhney, a dear friend who has co-founded multiple organizations with me, and who personifies the rising boldness of the movement…
But despite Leighton’s history supporting grassroots animal rights efforts, he’s not confident that social movements will be enough to solve the problem of animal cruelty. Most of his hope lies, instead, in lab-grown meat. The average human beings, Leighton believes, simply will not change his dietary practices, no matter how much we attempt to educate them. So our best hope is to replace meat from animals with a truly ethical form: grown from a vat, rather than a sentient being…
I’m skeptical of this approach. For one, lab-grown meat won’t solve the many other ways that animals are exploited: for their fur, as experiments, or as nuisances to be exterminated in the wild. I have said before that, while my current focus is factory farming, I have bigger fish to save. The suffering of a single species of deep sea animal, the bristlemouth fish, probably outweighs all the animals killed in factory farms in a single year. (Indeed, it may outweigh all the farmed animal suffering in history!) A solution to the mass torture and extermination of animals, then, requires a realignment in our political system and not just a replacement of one set of products. SOURCE…
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