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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
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @01:14AM
Sorry, but no. We have a mixed flock. A couple of our hens will go broody on a nest with no eggs -- one of them's doing it right now. Last two weeks, she's been the only one using a nest, and she's laid an egg every day or two, we always take it the same day, so it's empty in the morning. Today, she sat on the (empty) nest for 3 hours, acting mildly broody, and did not lay an egg. We're going to shut her away from that nest for a few days, but if we didn't, she'd go into full-on brooding over the next three days (yes, despite having no eggs to hatch -- chickens run on instinct, not a rudimentary understanding of biology). This bird has followed the same pattern several times over the past three years; she's really more pet than livestock, so we keep her around because she's beautiful and friendly, not for her egg production.
On the other hand, some will keep laying even if you leave a half-dozen eggs in their nest at all times. I've found a nest outside, which at least three hens had been laying in for several days, and it had a full dozen eggs in it -- and they were still laying more. The threshold to switch from laying to brooding is largely determined by breed, though there's a fair amount of individual variation within a breed; the breeds used for commercial egg production (white leghorn, and leghorn crosses) are far and away the least likely to go broody.
This makes sense, if you think about it. Given that the development of production layers started long before the battery system was invented, every hen had access to every nest; you may have a ratio of one nest to four or five hens, but that doesn't mean you get three or four eggs per nest. You'll end up with some nests empty, and some with much more than three or four eggs. Unless you collect eggs every hour or two, you're quite likely to wind up with a full clutch of eggs in some nest by the end of the day. So the broody instinct had to be more or less bred out of the production breeds to get any sort of decent egg production.