8. Beauty in the Beasts

Over the last few decades, animals have gained status in the Western world. We increasingly treat other species as worthy of moral consideration, and livestock, pets and research animals enjoy far more protections than they once did. For instance, there is a movement under way to grant great apes legal (or even human) rights, and many governments have severely curtailed research on primates; in 2010, the EU passed a ban on most research on great apes, to take effect in 2013, and a number of nations – including the UK, New Zealand, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and the US – have suspended the funding of new research on chimpanzees.

We’re elevating the standing of pets, too. Some cities – including St. Louis, Missouri; Bloomington, Indiana; Windsor, Ontario; and Beverly Hills, California – have passed laws that say humans aren’t owners of their pets – instead, they are guardians of them. Pet-mad Americans spend more than $50 billion (£31.5 billion) a year on their pets, including $4.1 billion (£2.6 billion) on services such as grooming and pet-sitting and $450 million (£284 million) on ‘pet insurance’. The British market is smaller – about £2.7 billion – but is one of the few areas of spending that was not hit by the economic downturn.

However, these figures pale in comparison with the $300 billion Americans spend every year eating animal flesh. When Harold Herzog, the American psychologist who specializes in human-animal relations, surveyed his own students, he discovered that nearly half of them agreed with the statement ‘Animals are just like people in all important ways.’ But of these students who put animals and people on the same plane, 90 percent of them ate meat and 50 percent supported xenotransplantation. National surveys have turned up similar findings. In a Gallup poll, 71 percent of people said that animals deserved ‘some protection from harm and exploitation’, and an additional 25 percent said that animals should have the same rights as people. Yet 64 percent of all respondents accepted the practice of using animals in medical research. More astoundingly, of those who said that animals deserved the exact same rights as humans, 44 percent supported at least the occasional use of animals in such research.

These conflicting attitudes position most of us in a terrain that Herzog calls the ‘troubled middle’ (a term he credits to the philosopher and bioethicist Strachan Donnelly). The troubled middle is a land of contradictions. It’s a place where it’s possible to truly love animals and still accept their occasional role as resources, objects and tools. Those of us in the troubled middle believe that animals deserve to be treated well, but we don’t want to ban their use in medical research. We care enough to want livestock to be raised humanely, but don’t want to abandon meat-eating altogether. ‘Some argue that we are fence-sitters, moral wimps’, Herzog, himself a resident of the troubled middle, writes. ‘I believe, however, that the troubled middle makes perfect sense because moral quagmires are inevitable in a species with a huge brain and a big heart. They come with the territory.’

Even Charles Darwin was a resident of the troubled middle. Darwin hated animal cruelty, but famously refused to condemn invasive animal research. ‘I know that physiology cannot possibly progress except by means of experiments on living animals’, he wrote, ‘and I feel the deepest conviction that he who retards the progress of physiology commits a crime against mankind’.

For the vast majority of us who reside in the troubled middle, there are no easy answers to the ethical dilemmas that biotechnology can pose. As biotechnology moves forward, we’ll have to carefully evaluate each application on its own terms, trying to balance what’s in the best interests of an individual animal with what’s good for its species as a whole, for humanity, and for the world that we all share. Even if we decide that there are instances in which animal discomfort is justified, we should take this discomfort seriously. We do that by making sure animals’ pain is controlled – by anesthetizing them, for instance, before performing surgical procedures – by meeting their physical and psychological needs while they’re living in laboratories, and by keeping the numbers of experimental animals as low as possible.

Perhaps the most valuable thing our expanding scientific capabilities will do is spark a real dialogue about our interactions with the other living beings that populate this planet. ‘We’ve always had strong moral responsibility, or we should have had, to other species’, says Richard Twine, the British sociologist. ‘We just haven’t exercised that very well.’ Biotechnology provides an opening for reconsidering our obligations to animals. How can we seize this moment to rethink our relationships with other species and recommit to their well-being?

For starters, the techniques of today and tomorrow could help us reverse the pain and suffering we’ve inflicted upon the animal kingdom. For an example, we need look no farther than the burgeoning field of canine genetics. Over the generations, we have bred and inbred our canine companions to the point of disease and deformity. One analysis of fifty popular dog breeds turned up a total of 396 inherited diseases affecting the canines; each breed included in the analysis had been linked to at least four, and as many as seventy-seven, different hereditary afflictions. Dalmatians are prone to deafness, Dobermanns suffer from narcolepsy (the image of a fierce canine suddenly nodding off would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic), and Labrador retrievers are renowned for their terrible hips. In some cases, these disorders are nasty side effects of a small gene pool, of generations of breeding related dogs or relying on just a few popular sires. In others, they’re due to intentional selection for the exaggerated physical traits prized by kennel clubs and dog show judges.56

Thanks to modern genetics and genomics, we’re developing the tools to undo the damage we’ve done and conquer many canine ailments. As of 2012, commercial labs in North America, Europe and Australia were offering tests for eighty genetic mutations linked to doggy diseases. For less than £60, for example, VetGen can tell you whether your beagle has genetic variants that cause a bleeding disorder, vital information that could help you secure the right medical care for your pooch. Breeders have also started using DNA testing results to create healthier dogs in the first place, carefully arranging matings that reduce the number of puppies prone to serious illnesses. Many canine diseases are inherited in a recessive pattern, meaning that a dog has to have two copies of a disease-causing mutation in order to develop the disorder. In these cases, dogs with a single copy of the mutation are known as carriers – they’re healthy, but they can pass the bad gene on to their puppies. When two carriers mate, there’s a chance that some of the puppies will inherit the unhealthy variant from both parents and will, in turn, get sick. Genetic testing can reveal which dogs are free of recessive, disease-causing mutations and can thus be bred without restriction. The carriers can breed too, as long as they mate with non-carriers. In this way, we can reduce the number of dogs that develop serious ailments while allowing the maximum number of pooches to contribute their genes to future generations. As it happens, genetic testing, followed by thoughtful breeding, has already reduced the number of English springer spaniels carrying a gene for a metabolic disease and the prevalence of progressive blindness among Irish setters and corgis.

Identifying the genes responsible for disease also opens up new possibilities for treatment, including gene therapy, in which vets give their canine patients a ‘healthy’ version of whatever gene has gone haywire. Gene therapy experiments have been remarkably successful in dogs, with one project even giving blind dogs the gift of sight. These dogs had all been blind since birth, due to a mutation in a gene known as RPE65, which normally codes for a protein crucial to vision. In 2001, Gustavo Aguirre, a veterinary ophthalmologist and geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, and his colleagues engineered a virus that contained a healthy form of RPE65. They injected the virus into the eyes of their blind canine patients. The viruses delivered the new RPE65 gene into the dogs’ cells, which then started churning out a fully functional version of the critical protein – for the first time in these animals’ lives. Within two weeks, the dogs’ vision began to improve; within four months, they were able to successfully navigate a laboratory obstacle course. And the fix was permanent; the first canine patient lived for eleven years after the gene therapy, able to see until its dying day. (For blind animals – and humans – that aren’t good candidates for gene therapy, scientists are working on another option: bionic eyes, or retinal prostheses. The approach involves implanting electrodes in the eye that stimulate the retinal cells.)

Genetic technology isn’t just for diseases that have an obvious heritable component. In 2011, Helen Sang – the Roslin Institute biologist who engineered transgenic chickens that laid eggs packed with pharmaceuticals – made another breakthrough. Working with Laurence Tiley, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, Sang created genetically modified chickens that are incapable of spreading avian influenza to the other members of their feathered flocks. The intervention isn’t perfect; for reasons Sang doesn’t yet fully understand, the GM chickens can still contract the flu themselves, but they don’t transmit the normally contagious illness to other birds. But it’s a start, and even this one small genetic tweak could save the lives of countless chickens and reduce the threat to human health, representing the ultimate win-win. In fact, Duane Kraemer, the scientist who helped clone several species, thinks that biotechnology has so much potential to improve the health of farmed animals – and to safeguard the health of humans along the way – that ‘cloned’ and ‘genetically engineered’ may one day acquire the same cachet as ‘organic’ or ‘free range’. ‘What I would like to see happen’, he says, ‘is for the products and the strains of animals that are developed – for people to become so proud of those that they’ll advertise: ‘These are cloned and genetically engineered products! And they’re special!’ I think someday that will happen, and that’s when the public will of course be much more accepting.’

Of course, even endeavours that seem as straightforward as making disease-resistant animals can be fraught with ethical complexity. In some situations – such as when we’re dealing with farm animals – our motivations may not be entirely altruistic. ‘You have to bear in mind the economic context of their lives’, Twine says. ‘Clearly, the main motivation for making animals disease-resistant is to maximize profitability of their existence as commodities. There could be some benefit in terms of an animal perhaps having less degrees of suffering, but of course they don’t escape that category of commodified farmed animal. They still have to face an early death in the slaughter house.’ Furthermore, operators of factory farms may view the creation of healthier and hardier animals as an excuse to cram livestock into crowded pens, let them live in unhygienic conditions, and otherwise treat them poorly.

Or consider a more extreme prospect, laid out in a 2010 New York Times editorial headlined NOT GRASS-FED, BUT AT LEAST PAIN-FREE. In it, Adam Shriver, a PhD student at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in philosophy and neuroscience, outlined a remarkable bit of research. Scientists had discovered, he wrote, how to genetically engineer mice that were missing enzymes critical to the brain’s pain-processing system. That made the rodents unable to feel pain, as though they were hooked up to a permanent morphine drip. Shriver set forth a radical proposal: Given the animal suffering inherent in the meat industry, and the fact that humans aren’t likely to abandon their carnivorous ways anytime soon, we should start genetically engineering livestock that feel less pain. ‘If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether’, he wrote, ‘the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on them’. Every logical bone in my body agrees with Shriver, yet the emotional part of me resists. Though the ostensible goal of engineering pain-free animals is to minimize other species’ discomfort, what it’s really doing is alleviating our own. If we think these creatures aren’t capable of feeling much pain, will that give us licence to alter and exploit them in even more profound ways?

These are the discussions we’ll need to have if we have any hope of using our new technologies responsibly. Do we want to make genetically engineered, disease-resistant livestock so that we can get away with substandard living conditions and inadequate medical care, while maximizing profits on factory farms? Or do we want to use these creatures as an opportunity to launch a broader campaign to improve the lives of farm animals? In some ways, our own unease with these technologies is productive – it means we will have to keep evaluating and reevaluating their consequences for animals.

The important thing is that we do not throw the genetically modified baby out with the bathwater. We spend so much time discussing the ethics of using our emerging scientific capabilities that we sometimes forget that not using them has ethical implications of its own. How many animals (and humans) will suffer if we turn our backs on breakthroughs like a genetically engineered chicken incapable of spreading the flu? Biotechnology is not the only solution to what ails animals, but it’s a weapon we now have in our arsenal, one set of strategies for boosting animal health and welfare. If we reject it out of hand, we lose the good along with the bad.

If we really want to boost animal welfare, perhaps we should be embracing technology, not running from it. That’s what George Dvorsky, a Canadian bioethicist and futurist, believes. Dvorsky, who heads up the Rights of Non-human Persons programme at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, says we owe animals far more than merely leaving them alone. Instead, he thinks we have a responsibility to use all the scientific techniques at our disposal to improve their lives. As a society, he says, we are increasingly toying with the prospect of human enhancement, with our growing ability to use some combination of pharmacology, genetics and electronics to upgrade our bodies and brains. In Dvorsky’s mind, if we’re going to build a better version of our own species, animals should get the benefit of the same technologies.

One option: enhancing animals’ sensory skills. For instance, while dogs have a great sense of smell, their vision isn’t quite so spectacular. ‘Their horizon line is extremely low’, Dvorsky says. ‘They don’t see in the broad spectrum of colours that we do.’ The right genetic manipulation or brain chip might change that. Dvorsky also imagines making dramatic upgrades to animal cognition, altering the genome of a bonobo in ways that supercharge its memory, for instance, or boost its capacity for using complex forms of language. ‘I realize how absolutely extreme that sounds’, he admits. ‘It’s really, really out there. But I’m doing my duty as a thinking person. Just because we lucked out in the genetic lottery doesn’t mean that we don’t have a moral responsibility and obligation to the other animals of the planet.’

Dvorsky’s dream of memory enhancement is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Scientists have already engineered dozens of strains of ‘smart mice’, which learn faster and retain more than their non-modified counterparts. Another team of researchers managed to improve rats’ performance on a memory test by using implanted electrodes to stimulate neurons in the hippocampus, a brain structure involved in memory formation and storage.

Dvorsky has been criticized for being an interspecies imperialist, for suggesting that animals would be better off if they were more like us. But that’s not quite what he’s saying; he wants to augment animals’ natural talents and capabilities, which may or may not actually make them more humanlike. In fact, Dvorsky says we could improve ourselves by adopting certain animal characteristics – the vision of a hawk, for instance, or the ability to swim underwater for extended periods of time, like a dolphin. What he imagines, he says, is a total ‘blurring of the species line’, the scientific elevation of ‘the entire biosphere’ – humans, dolphins and dogs all gaining new capabilities together.

It’s still unclear whether we’ll ever be able to enhance the bonobo’s language skills and, more pertinently, whether doing so would improve the ape’s quality of life. But I agree with Dvorsky that there are instances in which engineering (or reengineering) animals is a moral imperative.

The world is becoming ever more human, increasingly created by us, for us. We dam rivers, till land and clear forests right under the feet and fins of the creatures that live there. We spray plants with toxic fertilizers and dump our industrial waste in lakes and rivers. We take far-flung holidays, allowing foreign species to make their way into new lands. (In fact, we are changing the environment so completely that geologists have given our epoch a new name: the Anthropocene, from the Greek root anthropo, which means ‘human’.) Then there’s climate change, which is altering the slim slices of habitat animals have left. Some species will adapt, of course; as the planet warms, birds have expanded their ranges northward. But for others, the rapid pace of change we’re causing will simply be too much. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that an increase of 3.5 degrees Celsius in global temperature could result in the extinctions of anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of the planet’s species.

Even when we’re not driving entire species towards extinction, we remain a powerful evolutionary force, capable of transforming the bodies of wild animals. Consider the impact that our hunting and harvesting has had on entire populations. Though a big ram with large antlers is the last animal a wild predator would target, human hunters covet these impressive specimens. We have harvested so many of these large deer, elk and sheep over the centuries that many species have evolved smaller body and horn sizes. Similarly, fish have adapted to human harvesting by developing thinner bodies capable of sneaking out of nets.

Humans are a force of nature – we are, in some senses, the force of nature – and we influence animals whether we intend to or not. So the real question, going forward, is not whether we should shape animals’ bodies and lives, but how we should do so – with what tools, under what circumstances and to what end. Are the needs of other species truly best served by leaving them to fend for themselves in a world that we have come to dominate? Unless we plan to move all humanity to Mars and leave Earth to rewild itself, we may need to help our furry and feathered friends survive in a world that has us in it. As Kraemer puts it: ‘I’m of the persuasion that we are changing the habitat for wildlife so rapidly that we may have to help those species evolve.’

We’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. We’ve seen how scientists are already changing animal lives and considered how their work might play out in the near future. But what about the more distant one? If we went on a tour of the world’s pet shops, nature reserves and family farms fifty or one hundred years from now, what would we see? There are enough journalists, politicians and ethicists out there speculating about the worst-case scenarios – the glowing teenagers, the resurrected Hitlers, the killer cyborg armies. They’ve got the apocalyptic visions covered. After my time in the land of cloned creatures and bionic beasts, I’m ready to imagine an alternative future, one in which biotech brings hope and promise rather than anxiety and alarm.

In this world, I envision stocking our fields and farms with healthier animals. We’ll find cows, goats and horses that are naturally resistant to disease and then clone them. When we can’t find such mutants, we’ll make them, engineering livestock that are free from diseases that threaten both humans and animals. We could modify all cows so that their milk contains higher levels of antibacterial compounds or heart-healthy fats. That way, we wouldn’t need a special prescription for supermilk – it’s what we’d all be drinking by default. And we could create animals whose milk is better for their own nursing offspring.

We could also equip all farm animals with tiny electronic devices, such as the temperature-sensing microchips that are beginning to make their way onto the market. When injected just underneath the skin, these ‘Bio-Thermo’ chips continuously monitor a creature’s internal body temperature. Imagine deploying these devices on a massive scale, putting one in every farm animal as soon as it’s born. If the world’s farms all contained microchipped cows, goats, pigs and chickens, we could monitor the animals for sudden signs of fever and use the temperature spikes as an early warning sign of a possible disease outbreak.

Maybe we could engineer these chips to measure other health indicators as well – blood pressure, hormone levels and more – and combine them with wildlife tags. The tracking devices of the future could tell us not just where animals are, but also how they are. Are elephant seals thriving? Or are they just getting by? We could tag a large and representative sample of the seal population, keeping our eyes peeled for an unexpected rise in the rates of illness or death. The data might be able to help us identify an impending population catastrophe and give us the opportunity to intervene before it’s too late.

Closer to home, we could put these kinds of chips in our pets as well. My dream? Networking these devices with our smartphones. Envision the kinds of apps we could create: An alert pops up on your phone. It tells you that Rover’s got a fever, but no other vital signs seem to be abnormal. Given that the fever’s not high, the software recommends watchful waiting, but says that if the dog develops serious vomiting or diarrhoea, you may want to take Rover to the vet. The software provides a list of links for you to explore if you’d like to read more about the possible causes of canine fever and reassures you that it will ping you with updates every hour until Rover’s condition improves. I’d pay a lot for a system like that (and can think of more than one panicked call to the emergency animal hotline that it might have prevented).

When it comes to dog diseases, future pet owners may be better equipped to manage the occasional defects and abnormalities that do pop up. What if every new puppy came with a readout of its complete genetic profile? Armed with this information, we’d be able to provide our dogs with better medical care, monitoring them for early signs of illness and formulating treatment plans that keep them healthy as long as possible. We may be able to nip all sorts of problems in the bud with an early dose of gene therapy. Better yet, we might be able to fix defective genes in dog eggs, sperm and embryos. That would not only keep individual dogs from suffering, but also make more dogs eligible for breeding, thereby keeping the canine gene pool as diverse as possible. (Not a dog lover? Never fear. DNA tests and screening programmes for cats and horses are beginning to proliferate, too.)

We may be able to harness other laboratory breakthroughs to nudge all the world’s animals one step closer to immortality. One potential tweak involves a gene that codes for a metabolic enzyme that goes by the nickname ‘PEPCK-C’. (It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s much better than the enzyme’s full name: phospho-enolpyruvate carboxykinase.) PEPCK-C helps our bodies produce the glucose that our cells use as fuel. In 2006, scientists at Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, engineered mice that made elevated levels of PEPCK-C in their muscles. This single alteration had far-reaching effects. For one, the modified rodents were natural marathoners, capable of running for hours at a time without stopping. Normal mice tired and quit after just one-fifth of a kilometre on a mouse treadmill; the modified mice went twenty-five times as far, cranking out five kilometres at a stretch. Even more remarkably, the engineered mice lived two years longer than normal mice, and the females were fertile for twice as long. What if we made this same genetic modification in endangered species? It would give us animals that not only lived longer, but also had more opportunities to reproduce in the wild. This one small genetic change could be enough to help threatened populations rebound.

My crystal ball of biotechnology reveals other ways we could help animals transcend their biological limits. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if instead of euthanizing every broken-down race horse, we simply gave them all bionic legs? (Of course, it would be even better if we stopped racing horses altogether, but barring that, prosthetics may at least provide a way to keep more of these equines alive after catastrophic injuries.) Or we could push the field of animal prosthetics even further: What if we replaced the legs of aging dogs with springy prostheses that let them run faster and farther than they ever did as puppies? Or gave the future Winters of the world motorized tails, boosting the cetaceans’ speed and enabling them to flip and spin and perform exciting new tricks? We could make injured or elderly animals not just functional again, but better than nature ever intended. Bionic limbs might help our beloved creature companions stay spry as they age and squeeze as much life as they could out of each of their days.

These ideas might seem like pie-in-the-sky fantasies, but imagining a future in which we elevate animals and enhance their lives is the first step in bringing that world into being. And it’s not just animals that stand to gain. Indeed, we’ve already seen how technology can jump across species barriers. The prosthetic liner designed for a cheeky dolphin ended up solving major problems for human amputees. Some of the vision disorders that affect dogs have close analogues in humans, and the gene therapy that cured dogs of their blindness is being tested in visually impaired people. Optogenetics also promises revolutionary new treatments for human neurological disorders. As science advances, I suspect we’ll see more and more of this kind of crossover, with innovations in the animal world inspiring breakthroughs in the human one (and vice versa). In 2012, for instance, a team of Swiss researchers used chemical infusions and implanted electrodes to stimulate the spinal cords of paralysed rats. The treatment helped the rodents get back up and running again – literally – and it may one day do the same for paralysed humans. By enhancing animals, we may discover ways to make ourselves smarter and stronger, faster and fitter, healthier and happier.

Biotechnology is not inherently good or bad; it is simply a set of techniques, and we have choices about how we employ them. If we use our scientific superpowers wisely, we can make life better for all living beings – for species that walk and those that fly, slither, scurry and swim; for the creatures that live in scientific labs and those who run them. So it’s time to embrace our role as the dominant force in shaping the planet’s future, time to discover what it truly means to be stewards. Then we can all evolve together.