The Livewire Guide to Going, Being and Staying Veggie

Juliet Gellatley

Chapter 8 – Munching Monsters

The taste for killing living creatures and then eating them seem to have no limits. You would think the hundreds of millions of animals killed every year in Britain would be enough butchery and carnage for anyone, but some people are never satisfied and are always looking for a different experience – something new on their table to eat.

As every year goes by, more and more exotic animals are appearing on restaurant menus. Already it’s ostriches, emu, quail, alligators, kangaroo, guinea fowl, bison, deer – even guinea pigs. Soon it will be anything that can walk, crawl, jump or fly. One by one, we are taking animals from the wild and imprisoning them. Creatures like the ostrich, that live in family groups and run free over miles of African plain, are crammed into tiny, muddy fields or sheds in the chill of Britain.

From the moment it’s decided that it’s okay to eat a particular animal, a process of change begins. Eventually everything about that animal’s life is altered – how it lives, where it lives, what it eats, how it reproduces, how it dies. And every time a change is made, it is for the worse.

The end product of human interference is usually a poor pathetic creature whose natural instincts we’ve tried hard to erase. We alter animals so badly that in the end, they often can’t even breed unless we do it for them. And the ability of scientists to change animals is growing more powerful each day. With the most recent technique of all, genetic engineering, there are almost no limits to what we can do.

Genetic engineering involves altering the biological plan that makes every animal, human too, exactly what they are. It may seem strange when you look at a human body to think that it is following a plan but it is. Every freckle, every mole, the height, colour of the eyes and hair, the number of fingers and toes, are all part of a very detailed scheme. (I suppose it makes sense, really. When a team of builders arrives on a piece of land to put up a skyscraper, they don’t say, ‘Right, you start in that corner, I’ll start here and we’ll see what happens! They have a whole set of plans in which everything has been worked out to the last screw and nail.)

And in a way, that’s how it is with all animals. Except that there isn’t just one plan or blueprint for each animal, but millions of them. Animals (including humans) are made up of hundreds of thousands of millions cells and at the heart of every cell is a nucleus. Packed in every nucleus is a molecule called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) which contains genes. These hold the plan for building that particular body. In theory it is possible to grow an entire animal from just one of its cells – something so small you can’t even see it without a microscope.

As you probably know, every baby begins as a cell which is created when a sperm fertilises an egg. This cell is a mixture of genes, half from the man’s sperm and half from the woman’s egg. It multiplies and grows like wildfire and the genes are responsible for what the baby eventually looks like – the shape and size of its body, even the speed at which it grows.

Again, in theory, it’s possible to mix the genes of one animal with the genes of another, producing something which is half and half. Already in 1984, scientists at the Institute of Animal Physiology in the UK were able to produce a ‘geep’ – a cross between a goat and a sheep. What is more usual however, is to take tiny sections of DNA, or a single gene, from one animal or plant and add it to another animal or plant. This is done at the very start of life, while the animal is still little more than a fertilised egg. As it grows, the new gene becomes part of that animal and slightly alters it some way.

This process of genetic engineering has become very big business in deed. Huge multinational companies are spending billions of pounds on research, mostly to develop new foods. The first of these ‘genetically modified products’ are now beginning to appear in the shops all over the world. In 1996, approval was given in Britain for shops to sell tomato puree, rapeseed oil and yeast for bread making, all of which had been altered using genetic engineering. Nor do shops – in Britain at least – have to ell you which products have been genetically altered. So you could, in theory, buy a ready made pizza which included all three of these foodstuffs and you’d never know. They also don’t have to tell you if any animals have been made to suffer for what you are about to eat. And in genetic research into producing meat some animals have suffered, believe me.

One of the first known genetic engineering disasters was a poor creature in America called the Beltsville pig. It was meant to be a meaty super pig and, to make it grow bigger and faster, scientists introduced a human growth gene into the DNA of an ordinary pig. What they produced was a big pig which was in constant pain.

The Beltsville pig had joints so diseased with chronic arthritis that when it tried to walk, it could only crawl on its knees. It couldn’t stand up and most of the time it lay still, suffering from a whole range of other diseases. This obvious experimental disaster was the pig that scientists allowed the public to see – there were other pigs from the same experiment which were in such a disgusting state that they were kept locked behind closed doors.

But the lesson of the Beltsville pig hasn’t stopped the experimenting. In fact, genetic scientists have now produced a supermouse, double the size of an ordinary mouse. This mouse was created by introducing a human gene into the supermouses’s DNA that causes cancers to grow extremely fast. Scientists are now trying the same gene out in pigs but because people wouldn’t want to eat meat that had a cancer gene in it they’ve renamed it a ‘growth gene’.

In the case of the Belgium Blue cow, genetic engineering identified the gene responsible for increasing the cow’s muscle size and doubled it, thereby ensuring bigger, meatier calves. There was also, unfortunately, a downside. The female cows born as a result of this tinkering have slimmer hips and a narrower pelvis than normal – the very part of the body a calf has to pass through during birth.

It’s not too difficult to work out what happens. A bigger calf and a narrower birth passage means that it is often extremely painful for the mother to deliver her calf. Mostly, the genetically altered cows are unable to give birth at all. The solution is to cut them open (in what’s called a caesarian section) and remove the calves. This operation may be carried out every year, sometimes for each delivery and each time the cow is cut open, the more painful it becomes. In the end the knife is cutting not through normal flesh but thick scar tissue, which takes longer and longer to heal. We know that when women have multiple caesarian births (something that luckily doesn’t happen too often) the operation is excruciatingly painful. It’s the same for the cow. Even scientists and vets agree that the Belgian Blue cow must suffer great pain – but the process goes on just the same.

An even weirder bit of tinkering has been done to the Swiss Brown cows. It was discovered that these cows had a genetic weakness which meant they often developed a particular brain disease. But oddly, when this disease flared up, the cows gave more milk. When scientists located the gene that caused this disease they didn’t use the knowledge to cure it – they made sure the cows got the disease just so they would give more milk. Scary, or what?

In Israel, scientists have found the gene in chickens that is responsible for featherless necks as well as the one responsible for curly feathers. Using the two genes together they have created a bird that is almost bald. The few feathers it does have are curly, exposing the bare flesh beneath. The reason? So producers can factory farm chickens in the heat of the Negev desert where temperatures reach a blistering 45 degrees Celsius.

So what other little treats are in store? Some of the projects I’ve heard about include research into producing hairless pigs; experiments with creating wingless battery chickens so more can be crammed into each cage, as well as work carried aimed at producing sexless cattle, and vegetables with fish genes.

Scientists insist that it is safe to alter nature in this way. But a big animal, like a pig, contains millions of genes; and scientists have mapped just a hundred of these at most. When a gene is changed or a gene from another animal is introduced, they have no idea how the other genes are going to react – they can only guess. And no one can say what the long-term consequences may be. (It’s a bit like the builders on our imaginary building site changing a steel beam for a wooded one because it looks prettier. It might hold the building up – but on the other hand, it might not!)

Other concerned scientists have made some pretty worrying forecasts about what this new science might bring. Some say that genetic engineering could produce a whole new range of diseases for which our bodies have no resistance. Where genetic engineering has been used to change insects, some scientists are worried that it might result in new, uncontrollable pests.

The multinational companies responsible for introducing and encouraging this research offer all kinds of reasons why genetic experiments must go on. They say that it will result in cheaper food. Some even claim it will be possible to feed the world’s starving people. This is just an excuse. A comprehensive report for the World Health Organisation in 1995 made it clear that there’s enough food to feed everyone on the planet already; and that other economic and political reasons are preventing it from reaching those in need. There is no evidence to show that the money invested in genetic engineering will be used for anything other than to make a profit.

The long-term results of genetic engineering may be a disaster but there’s one thing we already know – animals are already suffering in the race to produce more and more meat as quickly and cheaply as possible.