Inquiring into Animal Enhancement

Model or Countermodel of Human Enhancement?

Simone Bateman, Sylvie Allouche, Jean Gayon, Michela Marzano, Jérôme Goffette, Simone Bateman, Sylvie Allouche, Jean Gayon, Michela Marzano, Jérôme Goffette

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137542472
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This book explores issues raised by past and present practices of animal enhancement in terms of their means and their goals, clarifies conceptual issues and identifies lessons that can be learned about enhancement practices, as they concern both animals and humans.

1

Animal Enhancement: Technovisionary Paternalism and the Colonisation of Nature

Arianna Ferrari

Abstract: This chapter reconstructs the debate around animal enhancement and describes what is currently being done in experimental research. It then goes on to show how visions of animal enhancement are currently discussed by their transhumanist advocates. These discussions use the positive rhetorical force of an expression like ‘enhancement’, bypass the practical aspects of what supporting ‘animal enhancement technologies’ concretely means –thus the problem of animal experiments – and rely on general arguments that stress the need to eliminate all the negative sides of ‘nature’. Suggesting a strong form of human-centred paternalism, the animal enhancement project presents ‘nature’ as a last frontier which can be colonised by the human technological enterprise.

Bateman, Simone, Jean Gayon, Sylvie Allouche, Jérôme Goffette and Michela Marzano, eds. Inquiring into Animal Enhancement: Model or Countermodel of Human Enhancement? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137542472.0006.

1The debate on ‘animal enhancement’

Originally developed to refer to medical interventions which go beyond therapeutic purposes (Lenk, 2002; President’s Council of Bioethics, 2003), the concept of ‘human enhancement’ was then extended to refer to science-based technological interventions on the human body aimed at improving human capabilities (European Parliament STOA, 2009).¹ The concept of ‘animal enhancement’ has since emerged as a transposition of the analogous term for humans, designating technological interventions aimed explicitly at improving animal performance.² Bioethicist Sarah Chan (2009, p. 679) describes the enhancement of an animal as something that ‘(1) [p]roduces an increase in some natural function or confers a novel function; (2) [i]mproves some aspect of the animal for human purposes; (3) [e]nables greater fulfilment of the animal’s own interests’.

The most quoted examples of animal enhancement research are related to the study of the mechanisms of cognitive functions, especially of learning and memory, done on animals in order to get results for humans,³ such as genetically engineered mice that manifest improved cognitive abilities, adult mice with human neural stem cells engrafted in the brain (the ‘human neuron mouse’) and animals made to interact with computer interfaces⁴ (Tang et al., 1999; Mamiya et al., 2003; Lehrer, 2009; see also Ferrari et al., 2010).

Research on cognitive enhancement has also reached the screen: in the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, scientists searching for a cure to Alzheimer’s disease create a new breed of apes with human-like intelligence. Cognition is, however, not the only property that can be enhanced: virtually all animal properties can be modified, especially through genetic engineering. In the experimental context, transgenic animals are created through the insertion of human genes in order to study human diseases (such as ‘humanized mice’; see, among others, Macchiarini et al., 2005). Other examples are: experiments aimed at creating disease- resistant transgenic animals in agriculture, in particular mastitis-resistant transgenic cows and goats (Donovan, 2005; Wall et al., 2005; Maga et al., 2006; Gottlieb and Wheeler, 2008); the creation of so-called Enviropigs™, genetically modified pigs which produce the enzyme phytase in their salivary glands so that their manure becomes less of a pollutant for the soil⁵ (Forsberg et al., 2003); and applications of cloning techniques to animals used in agriculture and sport⁶ (Galli et al., 2003; 2008). Furthermore, there are attempts to modify the physical appearance of animals using cosmetic surgical procedures, especially on dogs⁷ (Young, 2009; Schaffer, 2009).

One of the first documents in which we can find the explicit idea of ‘animal enhancement’ is the so-called NBIC report on converging technologies, where the possibility of directly controlling the genetics of animals in agriculture together with the construction of nano-enabled sensors to monitor the health and nutrition of cattle is seen as part of a larger project aimed at improving human performances (Roco and Bainbridge, 2002, p. 5).⁸ In his book Citizen Cyborg (2004), the transhumanist advocate James Hughes defends the principle of equal consideration of interests, thus considering the obligation to uplift ‘disabled’ animal citizens to be as strong as our obligation to uplift disabled human citizens. Hughes thinks here of technologies that could provide dolphins and chimpanzees in captivity with the means ‘to think more complicated thoughts and communicate with humans, ranging from systems to translate between human speech and animal thoughts to genetic enhancements of their brains’ (pp. 225–6). Another transhumanist advocate George Dvorsky (2006), director of Non-Human Persons program at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, argues that uplift biotechnologies represents a new primary good which confronts us with the moral obligation of uplifting non-human beings and eventually including them into what has traditionally been regarded as human society. Similar arguments are used also by bioethics and legal scholar Sarah Chan (2009) and by the transhumanist philosopher Julian Savulescu (2011).

In his ‘abolitionist project’, the co-founder of Humanity+ (formerly known as the World Transhumanist Association) David Pearce (2007; 2011) advocates the use of technologies to eradicate suffering from the living world. This includes the reduction or elimination of suffering at the individual level through the use of microelectrodes (to directly stimulate the reward centres), neuropharmacology and gene therapy, as well as at a more general level through the biotechnological transformation of animal predators into herbivores, which he calls ‘reproductive revolution’.⁹ Pearce, who as a vegan opposes the human exploitation of animals, proposes to change the framework of enhancement from a human-centred perspective to a non-anthropocentric one, calling for the development and use of technologies that serve ‘good’ purposes, such as the eradication of suffering.

In the debate on improving animal capacities, it soon became clear that one could also think of technoscientific interventions aimed at ameliorating the conditions of animals by diminishing their abilities. These particular interventions have since been discussed under the label of ‘animal disenhancement’. One of the oldest examples is the breeding of blind chickens, which apparently suffer less than normal chickens in crowded facilities. These interventions have been considered by some authors as a solution to animal welfare problems associated with crowding in the poultry industry (Thompson, 2008). Further examples can be found in genetic engineering, such as interventions aimed at knocking out the capacity to suffer and feel pain in animals in order to create insentient laboratory animals (Rollin, 1995) or insentient animals for the food industry (Henschke, 2012). Although some issues concerning animal disenhancement are peculiar to animal enhancement, such as the ‘moral conundrum’ of our intuitions regarding animal welfare and the need to diminish suffering (Thompson, 2008; Palmer, 2011) and to provide solutions for animal agriculture (Henschke, 2012; Schultz-Bergin, 2014), both debates show that enhancing and diminishing properties are two faces of the same coin (Ferrari, 2012b). It is indeed open to interpretation what technological interventions can be considered enhancements. This is because the very concept of ‘enhancement’ is not neutral, but normative, because it suggests a comparison and an act of evaluation. In order to classify an intervention as an enhancement, we need to establish criteria and goals as well as aspects with respect to which we judge these interventions. Furthermore, an improvement with respect to one criterion can also produce a deterioration with respect to a different criterion. This is clearly visible in the definition of animal enhancement suggested by Chan (2009) mentioned earlier, in which three different criteria (novelty, human interests, animal’s own interests) are proposed as equally possible for animal enhancement.

In current research practices, there is a profound link between animal enhancement and human enhancement: animals are de facto the objects of exploration and change in the technoscientific age because most of the research is performed on them, including the research that will possibly lead to the development of human enhancement technologies.

This material link between human and animal enhancement reflects a profound asymmetry regarding the technological applications in these two fields: while in human enhancement, only human interests are considered (although interpreted differently), in the case of animal enhancement, both animal and human interests are taken as parameters by its advocates (Chan, 2009; Savulescu, 2011).

2The silence about animal experiments

Regarding the reality of scientific practices, none of those who defend the animal enhancement project take into account the current state-of-the-art of the promoted technologies, clearly connected with the suffering and killing of billions of animals in experiments. Genetic engineering of animals is connected with the suffering and use of many (other) animals in order to breed transgenic ones, and it still relies on imprecise techniques often associated with detrimental unpredictable effects on the phenotype (Parnace et al., 2007; Ferrari, 2008; Kues and Niemann, 2014). Moreover, it is also one of the major causes for the explosion in the number of animals used in experiments (Ferrari, 2006). The case of cloning is similar: although the efficiency of this technique varies according to the animal species, cloning an animal remains a difficult task in general and is still at an experimental stage; it is mostly unpredictable in its effects on the phenotype and is profoundly linked to the human use of animals. If we take the example of cloning sport horses, the reason behind the support for cloning as an important reproductive technology lies in the current practice of sterilising these animals to render them more manageable for sport competitions. It is interesting to note that some of the major players in the American horse industry (such as the American Quarter Horse Association and the Jockey Club¹⁰) are opposed to the use of this technology, because they regard it as unnatural and worry about possibly compromising the animal’s health (Church, 2006).

Chan (2009, p. 681), who explicitly points out the reality of animal experimentation in this case,¹¹ does not problematize it at all, even if she does argue that ‘if we have obligations to act in animals’ interests, to benefit them and not to harm them, then we have an obligation to use enhancement technologies on animals when it is in those animals’ interests, and to refrain from doing so when it is against their interests. The greater the interest, the stronger the obligation in each case’. Pearce (2007; 2011), who promotes neuropharmacology, gene therapy and genetic engineering in order to abolish suffering in the living world, does not even mention the current suffering of animals for the development of these technologies. Furthermore Savulescu (2011) explicitly advocates the creation and use of genetically engineered animal models in research because of their promising potential for gaining important knowledge for the development of enhancement technologies.

Since advocates of animal enhancement generally ignore the use and abuse of billions of animals in scientific experiments, their call for fulfilling our duties toward animals appears at best ridiculous and at worst hypocritical. In their argumentation, animal enhancement advocates push speculative visions of technoscientific developments, but do not really engage with the ethical issues of current research. They refer to the general possibility of rendering animals ‘better than well’ but hardly consider the potential of technological interventions to protect animal’s own interests. In veterinary medicine, interventions that go beyond therapeutic purposes (as the term is frequently used in the human context) do not exist outside the reference to human use of animals.¹² Dog-breeding cultures, for example, which can be considered as an expression of the desire to make dogs ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Animal Enhancement: Technovisionary Paternalism and the Colonisation of Nature
• 2  Improving Animals, Improving Humans: Transpositions and Comparisons
• 3  Harming Some to Enhance Others
• 4  Sex Hormones for Animals and Humans? Enhancement and the Public Expertise of Drugs in Post-war United States and France
• 5  So Different and Yet So Similar: Comparing the Enhancement of Human and Animal Bodies in French Law
• Index