You might be asking, why a pig? I don't know, but forever ago I wrote software for a cardiovascular imaging lab and pigs were their primary test subjects. I was like, "why pigs?" and the PI was like, "Imaging-wise, pig hearts aren't too different from humans. Plus, we can give them a heart attack in the scanner and not go to jail. Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."
Pigs are really common in biomedical testing. They are physically a similar size and weight to humans. They also reach maturity in about 6 months. Much cheaper to raise than primates, and more likely to get approval for testing. My friends in biomed grad school named one of theirs cyber pig because it has about 30 different experiments ran on it before it was killed, and afterwards it was portioned out for further tests.
Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature. Weirder how it can be said without a sympathetic or concerned response. I hope we can someday move beyond seeing animals as a mere resource.
Bit of a tangent: I read the article to my wife and she mentioned that there is an episode of Grey's Anatomy where they wanted to perform a transplant of a pig's bowels but the Jewish (or Muslim?) lady refused. Interesting how one might choose to their faith over their life.
If they reach maturity in 6 months only then might it make sense to create humanized pigs (with crucial genes replaced by human DNA) that are cultivated specifically for their organs? Fairly cruel I know, but these pigs would be treated better than pigs cultivated for meat, that's for sure.
Are pigs used in biomedical testing ever butchered for their meat?
Seems like we kill a lot of pigs every year anyways. Would be neat if we could get multiple birds from one stone - for experiments where there isn't a risk of making the meat dangerous at least.
I wonder how long will it extend the life of a human after transplanted with Pig's heart. 5 years? Then I guess after every x years, they need new transplant? Though better than death, it is a painful stress.
truly disgustingly cruel how humans treat other sentient beings as irrelevant and inanimate. as a species, we kinda are underperforming the compassion we are capable of, except in self serving situations.
I am be responsible for purposefully creating a famine in India killing 3 million people and still be quoted as a badass in the future - Winston S. Churchill
I was only recently acquainted with the idea that there are many people on the internet who become very angry that some people eat dog meat, but do not with say cow meat or pig meat. — I find this rather strange and do not understand this.
It's all cognitive dissonance in the end. People are quite happy to have illogical and inconsistent beliefs because it lets them remain entirely ethical in their heads.
They will even become hostile when you challenge this because you are threatening the foundation of their ethics and mental health.
Dogs are carnivores. It is incredibly inefficient to raise dogs for meat, because you have to feed them meat to do so.
This pretty obviously isn't what people are principally reacting too, but it is massively understated when people get into "why do we eat A and not B?"
Please let's not pretend to ignore that some species are more "human like" than others.
- Plants are less "human like" than insects
- Insects are less "human like" than sharks
- Sharks are less "human like" than pigs
- Pigs are less "human like" than dogs
- Dogs are less "human like" than primates
- Primates are less "human like" than humans
Pretending that this is is irrelevant doesn't help discourse.
And yes of course this sorting is subjective, some people may find pigs and cows "just as" "human like" as dogs - but most people won't.
Since dogs have been specifically bred to be very close to humans (being companions, living in the home, etc.) whereas pigs and cows have been bred to be eaten, this shouldn't be surprising.
It's typically a North American - or sometimes Western European problem. As people become more lonely, they rely more on their companion pets. But ignore the obvious contradiction that they eat pigs, chickens or cows each day.
I'm not sure anyone else really worries about it from what I've seen, having traveled around.
Dog = carnivore domesticated as ally(superior smell/high speed etc)
Cow = herbivore domesticated for milk/meat
Eating dogs is terribly inefficient since they are carnivores. Seems fairly obvious that hunter gathers wouldn't have typically done this, and that it is a recent thing in regions that had famines & excess stray dogs.
I think dog meat anger is mostly the result of Yulin Dog Meat Festival in China. [1]
It's completely unregulated and the animals (dogs, cats etc) would often be tortured and killed by amateurs because properly killing an animal is harder than it looks.
Dogs are also not eaten for meat or taste and mostly done for superstition.
> "Imaging-wise, pig hearts aren't too different from humans. Plus, we can give them a heart attack in the scanner and not go to jail. Some labs use dogs. I just can't do that."
I wonder if they'd feel differently if they thought about how pigs are more intelligent than dogs.
Basically all of society is about conveniently ignoring ethics in illogical ways because it provides immense inconvenience and reward. I'm sure they could convince themselves that giving a pig a heart attack is just as evil as giving one to a dog, but then they wouldn't be able to perform studies which will save millions of lives in the future.
Because, as George Orwell said: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.".
It's a social construct like any, a partition or compartmentalization we put up to allow us to behave certain ways. Some cultures have different outlooks, some individuals have different outlooks.
I think the only logic to glean here, is that we're able to get more resources out of a cow, so it was useful for us to compartmentalize and abstract away farming them as different somehow, so we did.
Neither of any of the above. All of these animals are used and killed for research all the time.
The issue for many of them is the personal connection and memories individuals have developed with one species or the other. Then it does matter more if it is a pig or a dog that you are doing harm to. For that matter I have known researchers who are excessively fond of pigs, chicken or cows ...
There are important advantages to pigs over non-human primates.
Originally, research was centered around non-human primates (NHPs). But it didn't work out all. Sure, they're a bit closer to us genetically, but we still reject their tissues, so we would need to genetically engineer them. Humans are also much bigger than the non-human primates we can grow in the lab with ease and that have a fast enough reproductive cycle to make genetic engineering work out. So the organs would all be undersized. Ease of breeding is a big issue too, litter sizes for NPHs are very small compared to pigs.
It gets even worse though. Because NHPs are so close to us, they easily catch infections from us. So they're much more likely to catch diseases from us and to give us their diseases.
There are also ethical concerns with primates being so close to us, which don't exist with pigs given that they're primarily food animals.
It took around a dozen or so genetic changes to knock out markers that allow our immune system to recognize that pig organs are foreign. In particular, primates (including us) are sort of strange in that Alpha-gal, a sugar that's all over all other animal bodies, doesn't exist in us and our immune system violently rejects anything that contains it. Understanding this took a long time, but then we eventually figured out how to prevent pigs from expressing Alpha-gal.
That's basically the story here. Figure out why rejection is happening, knock it out, repeat. There are also many forms of rejection and it happens differently in different tissues. But, we're getting there.
> SOREN: Which brings me back to that little part of the article that piqued my interest in the beginning, because the pig that they got the kidney from to do this was a very special pig. Normally, pigs and other mammals that aren't primates have a sugar in their body that our bodies don't have, and so we don't like it or see it as foreign. And that's why usually an organ from another animal would get rejected. But this pig had been genetically modified. It had had the gene that makes that sugar removed, so it didn't have that sugar. Which is part of the reason this worked. And that sugar just so happens to be called "alpha-gal."
People have co-evolved with dogs as companions for a long time. And many people have fond memories of dogs and experience with them as part of a family. This is not generally true of pigs even if their hearts are closer to ours. Even as someone who doesn't like dogs, I find the idea of harming one (even with a good reason) worse than harming a pig.
Canine (dog) hearts are also very similar to human hearts. Historically, they were the predominant large animal model for cardiovascular diseases and many landmark studies used them. For some disease models a canine heart resembles an "old human heart" better than a pig heart.
The public sentiment is much more favorable for using pig hearts opposed to dog hearts. It's not nice having to explain that you kill dogs for your research.
oh, the heart attacks weren't accidental. They imaged the pig real time while inducing a heart attack to see how the muscle deformed. I never did ask what they did with the dead pigs, but they did have special carts to wheel them around the hospital. People didn't like seeing sedated pigs in the hospital so they had a cart with high sides and they'd throw a sheet over it.
pigs are also used for vaccine testing. Maybe because their immune system is similar to humans. I wonder if man-bear-pig could happen if pigs would develop bigger more folded brains.
I could be wrong but I believe those valves are harvested for their cartilagenous (non-alive) components, their cells stripped, the valves throughly cleaned, and implanted in place. This is not quite the same as implanting an organ with live cells autonomously producing potential antigens on a daily basis
My father got a brand new cow valve a few months ago. He had to choose between that, a pig one and a mechanical one, each one is better for each specific case from what I understand. But yeah, crazy stuff.
You can live indefinitely with animal valves though they may need to be replaced every 15 years or so. It’a a fairly straightforward minimally invasive procedure though.
A surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) for example will cost ~50K I believe? It will be covered by insurance if it is necessary.
There are also less invasive forms of valve replacement (transcatheter / percutaneous) which involve collapsing a synthetic valve around a balloon at the end of a catheter, inserting the assembly into a femoral artery, guiding the valve into the heart and into the open damaged valve, and then inflating the balloon and deploying the new valve inside of the damaged old valve. In SAVR the old valve is removed and the new one is sewn in. In transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), the old valve is held open by the new valve.
Not OP, but my dad was offered either a mechanical or pig valve when he had a bypass surgery done. Both were covered by insurance, I don't know which cost more, but he hit his deductible either way.
The pig was modified to remove presentation of immunogenic sugars on the cell surface. Unfortunately, the recipient needs to be on immunosuppressants the rest of their life.
This rekindles discussions back in school about chimeras... in order for the organs to be immunocompatible, the donor needs to be partially human. What % is too human to harvest for organs?
I suppose it's still too soon to answer such questions, but apparently, 0% acceptable.
I don't think it's really measurable, because a meaningful "%" implies a relatively context-free, relatively uniformly distributed importance to genetic sequence.
The most immunogenic sugar is glycolylneuraminic acid. Humans are incapable of making this sugar so it's immediately recognizable as alien by the human immune system.
You could in theory disable production of this sugar with a single base pair mutation which (if that's how you did it) would make this .000001% sequence difference extremely important over almost any other sequence point.
As a side note it's a matter of speculation that the lack of this sugar is an evasion mechanism for species-jumping flu.
Edit: tick thing was wrong, I had misremembered! Thank you smart reader who has since deleted their comment calling me out.
I don't think it is all that uncommon for regular human-to-human transplant recipients to be on immunosuppressants for life. If I'm not mistaken, that's the case for all organ recipients, but there may be exceptions. I think the concept of "immunocompatibility" can refer to a spectrum of outcomes that we haven't gotten down even for transplants within our own species.
Yes all transplant patients receive immunosuppressants. The only transplant that wouldn't would be an allogenic stem cell transplants (uses the persons own stem cells), however these people typically don't have an immune system to begin with.
They’re not making the pig more human, they’re removing the markers of ‘foreign’ that would make it an immune target. So it’s a nice vanilla organ that minimally attracts the attention of the immune system.
> Three genes were turned off that might otherwise have triggered an immediate immune rejection – the recognition of a pig organ as coming from a different species. Six human genes were added to prevent blood from coagulating in the heart, improve molecular compatibility and reduce the risk of rejection.
> One final gene was turned off to keep the pig from growing too large.
So they actually did make the pig a tiny bit human.
Just removing some sugars can't possibly work, since the pig heart will lack correct MHC class I molecules, which will make it a target. So the patient will need permanent immune-suppression.
Speaking of chimeras, there is a Greg Egan short story from his book "Axiomatic" about a human leopard chimera which is bred by an eccentric billionaire specifically to pose for a painting. The actual story is even crazier.
The concern, I think, that it's obviously unethical to grow a 100% human child and then harvest its heart, right? You're talking about a living, feeling, thinking person! Causing them to suffer or to die is morally wrong, conversely, their life and their right to life have precious, incalculable, sacred value. The thought of harvesting, murdering a human being for one of their organs is repulsive, harvesting them for food is cannibalism and a taboo of the highest order.
And yet many humans eat bacon for breakfast without a second thought. On the operating table, the human heart and pig heart would probably be indistinguishable to a layperson, so why is the one sacred and the other free for the taking?
Human organ recipients also need immunosuppressants forever, outside of rare cases. This particular case sounds like a very small modification to the source pig, not a pig carrying a human organ.
I mean I imagine there's research trying to do exactly that: you can identify beating heart cells very early on in embryos, and chimeric organisms are a thing. I imagine someone somewhere is trying to swap out those early cells with human heart cells to see if you can literally grow a pig with a human heart.
I think people will only accept 3d printed organs, pig and animal things are too controversial for some people.
I was listening to a podcast on the CBC about AI and consciousness, and the idea that humans are distinct from an animal (beastmachine, great name for a butcher shop btw) comes from Descartes, who we revere in philosophy (for fair reasons)..
I think we can't blame people for wanting to separate themselves from animals.
When I was a teenager there was a novel adapted for TV by the BBC called “Pig Heart Boy”. It explored the emotional impact of this type of procedure on a teenager and the response from the public, both good and bad. I don’t remember much about it but it looks like it won a BAFTA.
Yeah when I read the title of this article my first thought was 'isnt that a thing, why is it news'. Then I realised that its not very common and I was just thinking of the book/TV show!
If pigs (or any animal) broaden the compatibility to other organs, what are the ethical implications for raising them with the intention to harvest their organs, if any?
On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat?
On the other hand, it does somehow feel different to me, perhaps because sharing organs somehow humanizes the pigs by emphasizing our similarity? I'm not entirely sure from where my hesitation stems.
I'm curious if anyone else read this story with mixed reactions.
> On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat?
Yes, in that it's morally superior to eating meat. Eating meat is mostly a nutritional luxury, but needing functioning organs is not. I'm a meat eater, but I imagine there are a number of vegetarians who would be okay with this sort of organ harvesting process.
Of course, if we end up able to grow organs in a lab environment instead of inside an animal, that's probably better for all involved.
I've teetered on staying committed to veganism for ethical reasons, and have spent time on and off with vegan diets. I don't at all think (nor do I think most vegans think [see disclaimer]) that pigs are worthy of equal moral consideration as humans. I, along with most humans, think that pigs as well as other animals are worthy of some level of moral consideration. Most would be rightfully outraged at the torture of animals for fun, for instance.
Vegans take it a small step further, the moral consideration of a pig outweighs the pleasure provided to our taste buds by consuming their flesh. The prior two examples of consumption and torture, while vastly different, are also on a whole different level than raising pigs to save human lives. If you agree that pigs and humans are NOT morally equivalent (which is most people, including most vegans [see disclaimer],) then I think you are committed to the idea that it is imperative to raise and kill pigs to save human lives.
[Disclaimer: neither vegans or non-vegans are monoliths. There are countless ethical, religious, and practical frameworks one will employ to arrive at any particular ethical position.]
"I'm curious if anyone else read this story with mixed reactions."
Definitely.
There are the whole experimentation and vivisection angles that makes it potentially more abusive and agonising than slaughter, especially under the usual commercial incentives, weak jurisdictions etc. The headlines will inevitably come.
If they were raised for organs rather than meat for consumption, we'd likely treat them better. Not only because of the emotional causes, but because they'd probably be worth a lot of money so the investment would be greater to keeping them alive.
> Out of 13 such transplants performed by Keith Reemtsma, one kidney recipient lived for 9 months, returning to work as a schoolteacher. At autopsy, the chimpanzee kidneys appeared normal and showed no signs of acute or chronic rejection.
The pigs realize more than you'd think, their moms know when you're about to castrate the babies and they remember it, too.
When the slaughterhouse van comes along, they can feel something is wrong, this is, before the van is even visible. They might remember other pigs not coming back from the ride or something, but to kill another animal to save the human animal is not very nice.
To try to be nice is to rally against nature itself. If you strive to be nice then you are automatically at odds with the driving force of nature. You want to make the world a nice place? Then by definition there can be no losers and if there are no losers there is no evolution. If there is no evolution, there is no life, only a slow descent bck to maximum entropy. So the ultimate question is not "do you want to be nice?" but "do you prefer life over non life?". Is the pain of existence worth it? some say yes, some say no, both are valid opinions. Personally I say yes. But I wouldn't blame a person for being anti life and working actively to destroy it.
I get it if it's a vegan argument or something, but come on, we harvest pigs on an industrial scale. We can use their organs however we want because we are the apex predator, that's just life.
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Seems like we kill a lot of pigs every year anyways. Would be neat if we could get multiple birds from one stone - for experiments where there isn't a risk of making the meat dangerous at least.
They will even become hostile when you challenge this because you are threatening the foundation of their ethics and mental health.
This pretty obviously isn't what people are principally reacting too, but it is massively understated when people get into "why do we eat A and not B?"
- Plants are less "human like" than insects - Insects are less "human like" than sharks - Sharks are less "human like" than pigs - Pigs are less "human like" than dogs - Dogs are less "human like" than primates - Primates are less "human like" than humans
Pretending that this is is irrelevant doesn't help discourse.
And yes of course this sorting is subjective, some people may find pigs and cows "just as" "human like" as dogs - but most people won't.
Since dogs have been specifically bred to be very close to humans (being companions, living in the home, etc.) whereas pigs and cows have been bred to be eaten, this shouldn't be surprising.
I'm not sure anyone else really worries about it from what I've seen, having traveled around.
Cow = herbivore domesticated for milk/meat
Eating dogs is terribly inefficient since they are carnivores. Seems fairly obvious that hunter gathers wouldn't have typically done this, and that it is a recent thing in regions that had famines & excess stray dogs.
It's completely unregulated and the animals (dogs, cats etc) would often be tortured and killed by amateurs because properly killing an animal is harder than it looks.
Dogs are also not eaten for meat or taste and mostly done for superstition.
1 - https://www.animalsasia.org/us/media/news/news-archive/china...
I wonder if they'd feel differently if they thought about how pigs are more intelligent than dogs.
I think the only logic to glean here, is that we're able to get more resources out of a cow, so it was useful for us to compartmentalize and abstract away farming them as different somehow, so we did.
The issue for many of them is the personal connection and memories individuals have developed with one species or the other. Then it does matter more if it is a pig or a dog that you are doing harm to. For that matter I have known researchers who are excessively fond of pigs, chicken or cows ...
Deleted Comment
Originally, research was centered around non-human primates (NHPs). But it didn't work out all. Sure, they're a bit closer to us genetically, but we still reject their tissues, so we would need to genetically engineer them. Humans are also much bigger than the non-human primates we can grow in the lab with ease and that have a fast enough reproductive cycle to make genetic engineering work out. So the organs would all be undersized. Ease of breeding is a big issue too, litter sizes for NPHs are very small compared to pigs.
It gets even worse though. Because NHPs are so close to us, they easily catch infections from us. So they're much more likely to catch diseases from us and to give us their diseases.
There are also ethical concerns with primates being so close to us, which don't exist with pigs given that they're primarily food animals.
It took around a dozen or so genetic changes to knock out markers that allow our immune system to recognize that pig organs are foreign. In particular, primates (including us) are sort of strange in that Alpha-gal, a sugar that's all over all other animal bodies, doesn't exist in us and our immune system violently rejects anything that contains it. Understanding this took a long time, but then we eventually figured out how to prevent pigs from expressing Alpha-gal.
That's basically the story here. Figure out why rejection is happening, knock it out, repeat. There are also many forms of rejection and it happens differently in different tissues. But, we're getting there.
If you want to read more, here's an awesome recent review of the history and state of the field: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.0306...
https://farragobooks.com/book/the-organ-grinders/
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/alpha... and https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/retur... are good listens on the subject.
In particular from the second one:
> SOREN: Which brings me back to that little part of the article that piqued my interest in the beginning, because the pig that they got the kidney from to do this was a very special pig. Normally, pigs and other mammals that aren't primates have a sugar in their body that our bodies don't have, and so we don't like it or see it as foreign. And that's why usually an organ from another animal would get rejected. But this pig had been genetically modified. It had had the gene that makes that sugar removed, so it didn't have that sugar. Which is part of the reason this worked. And that sugar just so happens to be called "alpha-gal."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx_and_Crake
A dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Non-scientific:
- https://thednatests.com/how-much-dna-do-humans-share-with-ot...
Scientific:
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25689318/
- https://aces.illinois.edu/news/human-pig-genome-comparison-c...
The public sentiment is much more favorable for using pig hearts opposed to dog hearts. It's not nice having to explain that you kill dogs for your research.
Deleted Comment
They stick a metal rod, that's been frozen in liquid nitrogen, into the piggy's heart.
This kills the heart cells.
Then they stuff the piggy into an MRI machine and take a picture of its heart -- because an alive piggy's heart beats and makes the picture blurry.
Then the scientists get a pretty picture on their computers and high-five one another.
Success, they all think: "mission accomplished. Funding secured."
https://www.heart-valve-surgery.com/learning/pig-valve-repla...
Are you saying that replacing a valve in your heart is "a fairly straightforward minimally invasive procedure"?
There are also less invasive forms of valve replacement (transcatheter / percutaneous) which involve collapsing a synthetic valve around a balloon at the end of a catheter, inserting the assembly into a femoral artery, guiding the valve into the heart and into the open damaged valve, and then inflating the balloon and deploying the new valve inside of the damaged old valve. In SAVR the old valve is removed and the new one is sewn in. In transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), the old valve is held open by the new valve.
This rekindles discussions back in school about chimeras... in order for the organs to be immunocompatible, the donor needs to be partially human. What % is too human to harvest for organs?
I suppose it's still too soon to answer such questions, but apparently, 0% acceptable.
I don't think it's really measurable, because a meaningful "%" implies a relatively context-free, relatively uniformly distributed importance to genetic sequence.
The most immunogenic sugar is glycolylneuraminic acid. Humans are incapable of making this sugar so it's immediately recognizable as alien by the human immune system.
You could in theory disable production of this sugar with a single base pair mutation which (if that's how you did it) would make this .000001% sequence difference extremely important over almost any other sequence point.
As a side note it's a matter of speculation that the lack of this sugar is an evasion mechanism for species-jumping flu.
Edit: tick thing was wrong, I had misremembered! Thank you smart reader who has since deleted their comment calling me out.
Deleted Comment
> Three genes were turned off that might otherwise have triggered an immediate immune rejection – the recognition of a pig organ as coming from a different species. Six human genes were added to prevent blood from coagulating in the heart, improve molecular compatibility and reduce the risk of rejection.
> One final gene was turned off to keep the pig from growing too large.
So they actually did make the pig a tiny bit human.
If they can grow a pig with a 99% human heart, I don't see why that should be more ethically concerning that harvesting a 100% pig heart.
And yet many humans eat bacon for breakfast without a second thought. On the operating table, the human heart and pig heart would probably be indistinguishable to a layperson, so why is the one sacred and the other free for the taking?
Dead Comment
Human organ recipients also need immunosuppressants forever, outside of rare cases. This particular case sounds like a very small modification to the source pig, not a pig carrying a human organ.
I was listening to a podcast on the CBC about AI and consciousness, and the idea that humans are distinct from an animal (beastmachine, great name for a butcher shop btw) comes from Descartes, who we revere in philosophy (for fair reasons)..
I think we can't blame people for wanting to separate themselves from animals.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_Heart_Boy
On one hand, we already raise pigs to kill and eat routinely, and (mostly) people don't care - is this any different than say, buying a pig heart at the market to eat?
On the other hand, it does somehow feel different to me, perhaps because sharing organs somehow humanizes the pigs by emphasizing our similarity? I'm not entirely sure from where my hesitation stems.
I'm curious if anyone else read this story with mixed reactions.
Yes, in that it's morally superior to eating meat. Eating meat is mostly a nutritional luxury, but needing functioning organs is not. I'm a meat eater, but I imagine there are a number of vegetarians who would be okay with this sort of organ harvesting process.
Of course, if we end up able to grow organs in a lab environment instead of inside an animal, that's probably better for all involved.
I've teetered on staying committed to veganism for ethical reasons, and have spent time on and off with vegan diets. I don't at all think (nor do I think most vegans think [see disclaimer]) that pigs are worthy of equal moral consideration as humans. I, along with most humans, think that pigs as well as other animals are worthy of some level of moral consideration. Most would be rightfully outraged at the torture of animals for fun, for instance.
Vegans take it a small step further, the moral consideration of a pig outweighs the pleasure provided to our taste buds by consuming their flesh. The prior two examples of consumption and torture, while vastly different, are also on a whole different level than raising pigs to save human lives. If you agree that pigs and humans are NOT morally equivalent (which is most people, including most vegans [see disclaimer],) then I think you are committed to the idea that it is imperative to raise and kill pigs to save human lives.
[Disclaimer: neither vegans or non-vegans are monoliths. There are countless ethical, religious, and practical frameworks one will employ to arrive at any particular ethical position.]
/s
We slaughter more than 100m pigs per year in the US for food. I don’t think a few more million are going to cause a moral dilemma.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1177
Interesting and wild hypothesis. http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html
Yow. Surprised to see it mentioned here, or, well, anywhere.
Definitely.
There are the whole experimentation and vivisection angles that makes it potentially more abusive and agonising than slaughter, especially under the usual commercial incentives, weak jurisdictions etc. The headlines will inevitably come.
Apparently there was a newborn that lived for 21 days with baboon heart in 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Fae
Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenotransplantation ) also lists one successful kidney transplant from chimpanzee in 1964:
> Out of 13 such transplants performed by Keith Reemtsma, one kidney recipient lived for 9 months, returning to work as a schoolteacher. At autopsy, the chimpanzee kidneys appeared normal and showed no signs of acute or chronic rejection.
The pigs realize more than you'd think, their moms know when you're about to castrate the babies and they remember it, too.
When the slaughterhouse van comes along, they can feel something is wrong, this is, before the van is even visible. They might remember other pigs not coming back from the ride or something, but to kill another animal to save the human animal is not very nice.
I have started to specifically think of myself as "not nice". It's a more accurate way to describe myself.
I am not nice, nor do I strive to be. Life is hard and so am I.