HI-TECH LOWS: New technologies are trying to make factory farming more ‘palatable’
One new high-tech solution is a mask for cows that turns the methane from their belches into CO2 and water vapor. Wouldn't wearing a mask just be another form of cruelty, on top of the animal cruelty inherent in the cattle industry?
BRIAN KATEMAN: Innovation and technology are doing big things for animal welfare and the health of the planet. Meatless burgers from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are now mainstream in a way few could have imagined 20 or 30 years ago. Fermentation is being used to make dairy products without using cows. Scientists are exploring the use of cell-cultured meat as a potential climate-friendly source of nutrition for humans. We’re watching in real time as new technology makes it easier and more palatable for people to buy fewer animal products, especially those that come from factory farming.
On the other hand, we’re also witnessing some stunningly nonsensical uses of technology in service of maintaining the status quo. Rather than radically changing the way we eat or the way our food systems work, time and money are being poured into efforts to greenwash or humane-wash industrial animal agriculture…
One outside-the-box solution has gotten some traction lately. A group of students and alumni of the Royal College of Art have developed a mask for cows that turns the methane from their belches into CO2 and water vapor…
Setting aside what wearing a mask would feel like for cows—would it just be a new form of cruelty?—it’s hard to believe that this idea is scalable. We would need to produce, deliver, and place 1.5 billion masks on the world’s 1.5 billion cow snouts. Seems unlikely.
And don’t get me started on the creative solutions that have been proposed to reduce the carbon emissions from the other end of the cow. Researchers are experimenting with “toilet-training” and “cow-fart-backpacks” to reduce the climate impact of waste and gas…
One more absurd proposal from the cattle industry: virtual reality. Seriously. A Turkish farmer is reportedly experimenting with having cows wear virtual reality headsets to make them think they’re outside, on pasture. Besides the fact that scaling this strategy up would be incredibly expensive, if not impossible, the idea is ludicrous.
Importantly, all of these proposals for reducing methane fail to address any of the other negative impacts of animal agriculture: polluted water from farm runoff, the considerable water usage (about 1,800 gallons) required to produce even one pound of beef, the 80% of agricultural land used to produce a food that provides less than 20% of the world’s calories.
That doesn’t even begin to touch upon the animal cruelty inherent in the cattle industry. Even if you’re ethically unbothered by the idea of raising animals for slaughter, few would deny that the modern industrial animal agriculture system puts animals through grotesquely cruel experiences throughout their lives.
The repeated, forced insemination of female cows who are soon separated from their calves (the males of which are then tightly confined to prevent the development of muscle and then slaughtered at 20 weeks old for veal), the dehorning by cauterization, the tail docking, the entire lives spent indoors on a concrete-floored enclosure…
Which brings me to: If we care enough about cow welfare to offer them wearable technology that most humans don’t even have access to, why can’t we just stop confining, abusing, and killing them in the first place? SOURCE…
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