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posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 02 2017, @06:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the swine-version-of-the-universe-championships dept.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals claims that Cambodian farmers are breeding "double-muscled" pigs. "Double-muscled" refers to a mutation in the myostatin gene (MSTN) which normally keeps muscle growth in check. Disruption of MSTN can lead to the abnormal proliferation of muscle cells in an organism:

Mutant pigs bred to grow to an enormous size just to be slaughtered and eaten? No, we aren't talking about the plot of the eye-opening Netflix sensation Okja—rather, this is the very real horror that seems to be unfolding on a Cambodian farm, where genetically altered pigs are being bred to develop heaping knots of muscle mass. Disturbing video footage and images captured on the farm have exploded around the web, sparking discussions about the many ways that animals suffer and are abused when they're treated as nothing more than "food."

[...] When South Korean and Chinese scientists created 32 double-muscled piglets in 2015, according to reports, only one was considered even marginally healthy. But pigs suffer even without this "Frankenscience"—on typical pig farms, their tails are cut off, their sensitive teeth are ground down, and the males are castrated, all without so much as an aspirin. Then, even though we have a wealth of nutritious plant-based foods to eat, these intelligent, playful, sociable animals' throats are slit and their bodies are turned into pork chops or sausages.

Breeders have exploited natural double-muscling, which occurs in Belgian Blue cattle, to create behemoth animals who suffer from a slew of health problems—just to yield slightly larger profits.

[Note: On Google News, only corroborating sources seem to be British tabloids right now]

Previously: "Double-Muscled" Pigs Created Using Simple Gene Modification
Scientists Create Extra-Muscular Beagles


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Aiwendil on Monday October 02 2017, @05:21PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Monday October 02 2017, @05:21PM (#575997) Journal

    Can we eat meat without processing it?

    Heck, we can even eat some meat alive - worms for instance and lots of bugs and some seafoods (like oysters and squid).

    Then we have some food which we basically just gut and clean (most fish if it was healthy) (and killing+gutting+cleaning can be done with your bare hands and the water it was caught in, I have done it with baltic herring, easier if you nails are a bit longer).

    The question rather is just where you draw the limit for processing? Burying food for a while and then digging it up and eating it raw was discovered as a sideeffect of just trying to store food (just like letting things ferment in brine (hello surströmming and gravlax)).
    If you allow for lightly salted and dried meat that is eaten by ripping it apart with your teeth I eat about 0.4kg (400g) of that each year as a snack (dried reindeer, tastes better when you tear it apart rather than cutting it).

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