Frankenstein's Cat Quotes

“Humans are a force of nature—we are, in some senses, THE force of nature—and we influence animals whether we intend to or not. So the real question, going forward, is not WHETHER we should shape animals’ bodies and lives, but HOW we should do so—with what tools, under what circumstances, and to what end… Unless we plan to move all humanity to Mars and leave Earth to rewild itself, we may need to help our furry and feathered friends survive in a world that has us in it. As Kraemer puts it: ‘I’m of the persuasion that we are changing the habitat of wildlife so rapidly that we may have to help those species evolve.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“The troubled middle is…a place where it’s possible to truly love animals and still accept their occasional role as resources, objects, and tools. Those of us in the troubled middle believe that animals deserve to be treated well, but we don’t want to ban their use in medical research. We care enough to want livestock to be raised humanely, but don’t want to abandon meat-eating altogether. ‘Some argue that we are fence-sitters, moral wimps,’ Herzog, himself a resident of the troubled middle, writes. ‘I believe, however, that the troubled middle makes perfect sense because moral quagmires are inevitable in a species with a huge brain and a big heart. They come with the territory.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“Over the generations, we have bred and inbred our canine companions to the point of disease and deformity. One analysis of popular dog breeds turned up a total of 396 inherited diseases affecting the canines; each breed included in the analysis had been linked to at least four, and as many as seventy-seven, different hereditary afflictions… In some cases, these disorders are nasty side effects of a small gene pool, of generations of breeding related dogs or relying on just a few popular sires. In others, they’re due to intentional selection for the exaggerated physical traits prized by kennel clubs and dog show judges.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“As Rollin put it in his book The Frankenstein Syndrome, ‘It is simply false that all genetic engineering must harm animals. Unless one assumes that all species of animals exist currently at their maximal possible state of happiness or well-being of welfare, such a claim is not legitimate.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“Cloning is reproduction—it’s not resurrection.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“The controversy over pet cloning is a debate over what it means to love an animal, and it involves values and judgments that we may never all agree upon.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“… To many biologists, cloning is all sizzle and no substance, a high-tech spectacle that fails to address habitat loss, poaching, pollution, and the other human activities that put wildlife at risk in the first place…

But the time for first resorts has come and gone, and safeguarding species is an all-hands-on-deck enterprise. … Cloning won’t be a cure-all, but given the state of the planet, it can’t hurt to have options.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“Take tail docking…in which the last several inches of a puppy’s tail are removed, usually without anesthesia, sometimes with extremely crude instruments such as scissors or razors. The American Kennel Club (AKC), which develops guidelines used to judge canines in competition, prefers boxers, rottweilers, cocker spaniels, and dogs belonging to dozens of other breeds to have docked tails. In other words, an ideal specimen is one that’s been surgically reshaped by humans.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“The latest, greatest cyborg critters may come not from state-of-the-art labs, but the minds of curious kids and individual hobbyists. Though scientists will continue to build their cyborg animals, Maharbiz says he fully expects that ‘kids will be able to hack these things, like they wrote code in the Commodore 64 days.’ We are heading toward a world in which anyone with a little time, money, and imagination can commandeer an animal’s brain. That’s as good a reason as any to start thinking about where we’d draw our ethical lines.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“For the vast majority of us who reside in the troubled middle, there are no easy answers to the ethical dilemmas that biotechnology can pose. As biotechnology moves forward, we’ll have to carefully evaluate each application on its own terms, trying to balance what’s in the best interests of an individual animal with what’s good for its species as a whole, for humanity, and for the world we all share.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“We’ve always had strong moral responsibility, or we should have had, to other species,’ says Richard Twine, the British sociologist. ‘We just haven’t exercised that very well.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“Though the ostensible goal of engineering pain-free animals is to minimize other species’ discomfort, what it’s really doing is alleviating our own. if we think these creatures aren’t capable of feeling much pain, will that give us license to alter and exploit them in even more profound ways?”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts

“The important thing is that we do not throw the genetically modified baby out with the bathwater. We spend so much time discussing the ethics of using our emerging scientific capabilities that we sometimes forget that NOT using them has ethical implications of its own. … Biotechnology is not the only solution to what ails animals, but it’s a weapon we now have in our arsenal, one set of strategies for boosting animal health and welfare. If we reject it out of hand, we lose the good along with the bad.”
― Emily Anthes, Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts