Taiwan Shopkeepers Unveil 'Frankenfish' (GM Glow in the Dark)

[DUreader]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2913852,00.html


snip


``It must be really dark to see it,'' said Maria
Hung, who offers the glowing fish for sale at her
Goldfish Family store in Taipei.

The fish flit so quickly they come out as blobs in
photographs. And at about $17 each, they don't
come cheap. At Hung's shop, the goldfish in the
next bowl cost only about $0.29 apiece.

``Since I started selling the fluorescent fish last
month, I haven't found a single buyer,'' she said.

Taikong says its project is still in its infancy.

``We spent NT$100 million (US$2.9 million)
developing this fish,'' Kuo said, defending the retail
price.


snip

[GreenArrow]

1. "You vill eat the glowink vish"

"Ve haff vays ov making you eat the glowing fish," purred Dr. Monsanto, with a menacing leer flitting across his shadowed face.

[Merlin]

2. A very close friend broke this story 3 months ago.

He is a foreign correspondent for the WSJ, and this story appeared on the front page of the Journal.

This gives me a sense of how editors operate. Take a story somebody else breaks. Put it in the drawer. Several months later, pull it out, assign it to one of your guys, and treat it as "news."

[psychopomp]

3. Sign o' the times

90 percent are steralized, which leaves only a small chance of these modified zeebrafish slipping into the gene pool, we are told.

There is really no stopping this kind of human intervention in the biosphere, is there?

[Tinoire]

4. Glowing Fish? Featherless Chickens? What an obscene world!

The Featherless Chicken: "Cruel, Obscene, and Absurd"
---------------------------------------

ISRAEL — Mad scientists at Hebrew University in Israel, while playing with radiation and trying to develop new nuclear weapons, have bred a featherless chicken.

"When I saw the first one, well, you could have knocked me over with a feather," said chief scientist Chaim Hyman.

Now he sees economic potential in this. Because the chickens will not need to be plucked, he says that chicken processing plants will save money.

http://www.garlicnews.com/layout3.jsp?event=199


***************************************

<snip>

Cahaner states: "That's why the growth rate of broilers is significantly lower in hot seasons and why poultry meat is expensive in hot countries." He adds, "Feathers are a waste. The chickens are using feed to produce something that has to be dumped and the farmers have to waste electricity to overcome the fact." The chickens would also be cheaper to produce because the lack of feathers means there would be no need to pluck them.

<snip>

Rabbi David Rosen (a CHAI Advisory Board member), said that he considers this experiment barbaric and a perversion of nature.

Shira Skolnik of Hakol Chai, CHAI's sister charity in Israel, is quoted in a New York Times article (May 24, 2002):

In more than an hour spent watching the naked chickens and discussing chicken genetics in the fragrant spring air here, Dr. Cahaner never once mentioned the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which seemed worlds away. But Shira Skolnik of Hakol Chai, an Israeli animal rights organization, referred to the conflict in criticizing the chicken experiment. "In this part of the world," she said, "we don't need more examples of how to treat living things badly." She said that chickens needed feathers for protection from pecking and to help cool themselves, not only to warm themselves. "It's just awful," she said. "It's not enough that they're factory-farming these birds. They have to make their lives totally miserable."

<snip>

http://www.chai-online.org/chickens.htm