Okay, I'm sure there are all sorts of advantages here in certain circumstances (sunburn concerns aside), but … damn, those are creepifying. (h/t +Brandon Sergent)
Reshared post from +Amir Abbas
Featherless Chicken:
An Israeli geneticist, Avigdor Cahaner, created the world's first featherless chicken at the genetics faculty at the Rehovot Agronomy Institute near Tel Aviv, Israel.
The bare-skinned bird was created by cross breeding a broiler with a species that has a featherless neck. The idea behind the development of this naked bird is that it will create a more 'convenient' and energy efficient chicken which can live in warm countries where feathered chickens don't do well and cooling systems are too expensive to be commonly affordable. And of course, the bird doesn’t require plucking, saving additional money in processing plants..#featherless #chicken #israel
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It's only creepy because you can clearly see what it looks like once it's food while it's still alive. Westerners want their meat based food to look nothing like an animal, or failing that want that animal to look nothing like the meal. 🙂
They look weird sure, but as one who has had to spend time plucking chickens, the idea is great. Even now, the memory of the smell of boiled chicken feathers is nauseating me. (The quick way to pluck a chicken after wringing its neck is to dunk it quickly into boiling water — not long enough to start cooking it, but long enough for the skin to be damaged so that the feathers loosen.)
Also less feed will be needed because they don't waste food energy making worthless feathers. Now if we can just get them to be born without the ability to suffer. Starting with this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain
Then we can work on making the brain too simple to get bored. (Chickens are actually disturbingly intelligent.)
That's kind of awesome, actually. Pretty soon we'll be breeding a roasting beast that actually wants to be eaten, and is capable of saying so clearly and distinctly.
(Flashing back on Watson being attacked by suicidal confections in "Young Sherlock Holmes" …)
+Kingsley Lintz Douglas Adams for the win.
A pig that wants to be eaten
It's entirely possible. If pain can be turned off in the organism it could be re-purposed. Making our food animals total non-sentient or barring that, neurologically torture proof, would seem like an obvious solution assuming ethics and ability.
+Kingsley Lintz Like it Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
Ever seen a photo/xray of an owl *through*the feathers? They don’t look much different, creepy picture aside.
Why, yes, @Marina, I believe I have: https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/2012/04/17/wh-wh-who-knew.html
All right, so I *don’t* remember whether I saw yours first, or via anr route–I have been looking at owl pages a lot, due to a winery called Bubo claiming that was the name of Athena’s owl, which it’s not, unless we’re talking the not-historically-accurate 300 or whatever movie it came from. I think the winery predates the movie, but I think the movie had a print source well before that.
Since I have some energy invested in Athena’s Little Owl (Athena noctua), I do know at least a wee bit about Latin zoological names for various owls. The Little Owl does not have ear tufts, the Bubo family of owls, mostly Horned and Eagle owls, do.
I once encountered a Bubo outside the Francis Bacon Library one afternoon, in the daylight across the driveway from the hedge it was sitting in. A good 2′ tall. It felt like a piece of urban fantasy, decades before that term existed.
I’ve also been unable to keep up with your prodigious output, and may have missed that entry altogether, darn it.
Bubo was the name of the mechanical owl in the first version of Clash of the Titans. My friends and I preferred to call him “Owltoo Detoo.”
😀
Why am I not surprised? Of course, this is speaking by one who’s never seen those movies!
He was pretty cute.
He irked the heck out of me, @Avo, but I can understand the cuteness factor.
Brandon Sergent: You certainly have some bizarre and unsubstantiated ideas about what “Westerners” want. Are you sure that’s not just an expression of what YOU think of “Westerners,” whatever that means? It just so happens that the disconnection between livestock and their meat is a product of urbanization and modernization, not “Westernism.” The two correlate because so much of the “Western” world is modernized. Like most people, you assume that that correlation means something that it doesn’t…like, a lack of sophistication and/or intellect, or a haughty, demanding personality.