Is vertical farming a viable solution?

Would unconscious chicken farming be more humane?

• Saw this over at Wired http://www.wired.com/underwire/tag/centre-for-unconscious- Would this method be "better" ethically, i.e more humane? "Headless Chicken Solution" [...] involve(s) removing the cerebral cortex of the chicken to inhibit its sensory perceptions so that it could be produced in more densely-packed conditions without the associated distress. The brain stem for the chicken would be kept intact so that the homeostatic functions continue to operate, allowing it to [...] After this "desensitisation", the chickens could then be stacked into huge urban farms with around 1,000 chickens hooked up to each large vertical frames -- a little like the network of pods the humans are connected to in The Matrix. The feet of the chickens would also be removed in order to pack more in. There could be dozens of these frames in the vertical farming system, which Ford refers to as the Centre for Unconscious Farming. Food, water and air would be delivered via a network of tubes and excrement would be removed in the same way. This technique could achieve a density of around 11.7 chickens per cubic metre instead of the current 3.2 chickens achieved in broiler houses.

• Answer:

  Given that this came from an artist, rather than anybody experienced with, ya know, actual chickens, I consider this more "ethical thought experiment" than "actual possibility", and thought experiments always leave crucial details to the imagination.  Without knowing how to produce an "unconscious chicken", it's hard to guess how you'd react to an actual one. People would be uncomfortable with even many perfectly humane farming practices.  We anthropomorphize the birds without knowing them.  Seemingly kind-hearted efforts would actually make the birds very upset, and many things that seem intuitively awful are actually endemic to the fact that you're eating the flesh of an animal.  Ethics is ultimately about people's intuitive reactions, and are largely immune to rational explanations.  "Trolley problems" already serve to point out these irrational but nearly universal responses. Intuitively, people most effectively dissociate the muscles from being part of the anima of the animal, especially removed from context.  The parts that really "are" the animal are contained largely in the face, head, and internal organs.  People are squeamish about those; they seem more directly to feel pain.  Most people would feel squeamish about an unconscious chicken because the anima still appears to be in there. Even with the head entirely removed, we can identify enough of the animal to imagine it suffering.  We feel our own suffering in the muscles, even if it's the brain that's doing the interpreting.  To avoid that, you'd have to go all the way to vat-grown meat, which has none of the rest of the animal attached, and would look more like a lump than like a living creature.  Even then, people would have some qualms, but they'd be at least as much associated with eating something so far removed from nature.  You kinda can't win, so most people simply try to avoid thinking about the animals entirely.