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.