Is the answer to farm cruelty creating animal zombies?

I have been putting off posting some of the relevent articles I've come across both out of laziness and just a lack of anything that really stuck out as significant enough. But tonight I read something that just really made my stomach plummet.

In England apparently the concern for pigs and other intelligent animals who appear stressed when confined to cruel small cages has not convinced ranchers and government officials to change the way they do business. No, spending money on ending suffering by providing a decent life for the animals we eat is just not as 'profitable' as spending money on figuring out how to keep the animals from suffering by changing the animals.

Read from the UK:

Cloning opens door to 'farmyard freaks'By SEAN POULTER -

Moves to clone and genetically modify farm livestock have opened the door
to the creation of "Farmyard Freaks", experts have warned. News that the
daughter of a US clone cow has been born on a British farm has moved the issue
from science fiction to consumer reality. A former government adviser has
painted a nightmarish picture of "zombie" and fast-growing supersize
animals.

Professor Ben Mepham, of Nottingham University, said the
impact of bio-engineering, creating GM and cloned animals, is huge. Factory
farming techniques, most commonly used with pigs and chicken, often involve
keeping animals confined in cramped conditions. For pigs, who are
highly intelligent, these conditions can lead to stress and aggression.
However, GM scientists are actively investigating ways to remove the stress and aggression gene from animals, effectively turning them into complacent zombies. The professor said it might become technically possible to produce "animal vegetables" - beasts which are "highly prolific and oblivious to their physical and mental status".

However, he argued that while this could reduce the pain and stress of
factory farming, this did not mean it should be allowed to develop without
question. The professor of applied bioethics warned that many of the
GM experiments on animals have resulted in cruelty, producing mutants or animals which grow so large in the womb that they can only be surgically removed.

He said: "The question of whether humanity should take it upon ourselves to
alter animals by GM, involving in many cases mixing the genes of different
species - and sometimes those of human origin - is undoubtedly critical for many
people." The professor said that religious groups would see it as "an
attempt to usurp God's role" while others would be unhappy about "so
fundamentally altering the natural order". Prof Mepham, is a former
member of the Government's Agriculture, Environment Biotechnology
Commission.(AEBC)

In 2002, the Commission called on the government to set up a
regulatory body to police developments such as GM and clone farming. However, this was ignored by ministers, who subsequently scrapped the AEBC after it issued a number of reports challenging government policy in areas such as GM crops and food. The AEBC called for a ban on the creation of "intrinsically objectionable" creatures - such as pigs and cows modified not to feel stress in factory farming conditions. And it demanded separate farming and labelling of food from these creatures to allow consumers to make a choice about what they are eating. In 2002, the AEBC said the need to have in place a regulatory regime in place was "urgent" in order to prevent a repeat of the GM crop debacle.

In that case GM plants were already in British shops before there had been
sufficient research about the impact on human health or the environment.
Despite these clear warnings, the government's food and farming department,
DEFRA, refused to set up any kind of watchdog. The result is that meat and
milk from GM or cloned animals could be arriving on dinner plates in as
little as two years. The executive director of the Food Ethics Council, Dr
Tom MacMillan, said: "Cloning raise animal welfare concerns, both for the
clones and for their parents. "It also underlines how far removed industrial
food production is from what consumers actually want."

In my novel I'm not only dealing with this sort of engineering for food sake and how corporations (and governments) cover up and sneak it into the general population, but I also have a major move of naturalists who fight this sort of genetic modified food that creates a high demand for organic foods making it very profitable to run farms which are creature friendly.
Unfortunately I have yet to see the GOOD aspects of the predictions in my novel to show up anywhere.... just the creepy stuff.

Plugging away...

It's time to really start getting disciplined. The holidays are over and the kids are back in school and I have been distracted long enough from writing that I need to just do it!

I have been doing a lot of research and purposefully not putting things on this board as I'm not sure how much I want to put out publically. Mostly philosophy and outline type of stuff that puts me into a great frame of mind because it's getting more organized. I have to rewrite an entire chapter (plan to do that tomorrow) because I had a conversation last for 25 pages! And that is just RIDICULOUS. With the new outline I can start fresh and just write what I need to have them say.

The way I write is to just let it flow. I know what my characters are like and I know what they need to share with each other. But in this case they just go on too many rabbit trails... which is natural and normal for any type of conversation that is real, but in a single chapter you can't just do that - can you? I don't know. I don't think so. So tomorrow I will rewrite it completely from a point where it went awry. I was going to try to edit it, but that was taking me so long to figure out what to cut out and still have them flow naturally from one topic to the next.

I have beend doing a few things to keep in the spirit of the book - like making videos of myself on myspace and other video spaces, both because I enjoy it and to get the feeling of what it must be like to be seen. That urge to see who is replying and what people think is pretty strong. I can understand how vloggers would get so excited to put up something more and more radical just to get attention. There was actually a 20/20 episode about the craze for fame that said people are more interested in being famous than anything.

I've also seen a few other things I'm including in my book that are actually happening already. The excessive and against their knowledge air brushing of actresses, the animation added to sports game (saw a comet like football today), people flocking to videos of deformed or abnormal looking people, I heard someone got a tail surgically attached! At this rate, I'm going to have to move my date up another 20 years and have it take place in 5 years!! *L*

Hope I can actually write it by then.