Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Bioethics & Medical Ethics

Eating Stupid Pigs

Marco Kaisth asks, could radical genetic engineering create ethical factory farms?

Pigs are exceptionally intelligent animals. They’re able to solve odor quizzes, recognize themselves in mirrors, and even play rudimentary video games. One Cambridge University Professor, Dr Donald Bloom, has even claimed that pigs “have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly [more so than] three-year-olds” (‘New Slant on Chump Chops’, Cambridge Daily News , 29 March, 2002). Despite their intellectual powers, 110 million pigs are slaughtered for food every year in the US alone, the vast majority of them after short, miserable lives on factory farms.

…