What if we could reduce meat consumption, and thereby the suffering of farmed animals, by making people allergic to red meat?
That’s the proposal made in a recent Bioethics article by Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth (both at Western Michigan University). They suggest we deliberately promote alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a condition transmitted by tick bites that can trigger severe allergic reactions to mammalian meat. The idea is simple: if people can’t eat red meat, they won’t, and animals will suffer less.
In a new paper just published in the same journal, my co-author Christian Koeder and I argue that this approach is not only misguided, but morally problematic.
Continue reading “Why making people allergic to meat isn’t the solution”
Rainer Ebert 