Posted on 07/12/2013 7:29:20 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
STANFORD, Calif. -- Inside a lab on the Stanford University campus here, students experienced what it might feel like to be a cow.
They donned a virtual reality helmet and walked on hands and feet while in a virtual mirror they saw themselves as bovine. As the animal was jabbed with an electrical prod, a lab worker poked a volunteer's side with a sticklike device. The ground shook to simulate the prod's vibrations. The cow at the end was led toward a slaughterhouse.
Participants then recorded what they ate for the next week. The study sought to uncover whether temporarily "becoming" a cow prompted reduced meat consumption.
The motivation wasn't to make people vegetarians, said Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. But the project hoped to uncover whether virtual reality could alter behaviors that tax the environment and contribute to climate change.
"If somebody becomes an animal, do they gain empathy for that animal and think about its plight?" Bailenson asked. "In this case, empathy toward the animal also coincides with an environmental benefit, which is that [not eating] animals consumes less energy."
It's one of several environment-related experiments Bailenson is conducting in the lab, all tailored toward revealing whether there are new ways to encourage environmental preservation. Volunteers also have virtually chopped down a tree, a study aimed at examining attitudes toward paper use. Others took a virtual reality shower while eating lumps of coal -- literally consuming it -- to gain insight into how much was needed to heat the water.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
I knew I should have read the comments first.
This isn’t science, it is polemics. Thinly disguised at that. If these are the scientists we are training we might just as well close up shop and give the keys to the Chinese. They are the majority of the engineering students here anyhow.
I eat meat, but I do feel compassion and gratefullness to the animals who died. I saw one of the most depressing videos the other day. A dairy cow had given birth, and they took the calf from her a few hours after birth. They must be separated because the dairy cow’s milk is sold, of course. The poor little calf tried to get back to its mother, and the mother tried to get her calf, even following the van the calf was in until it could no longer. The little calf was then put in a small stall in a barn. It was eye opening to me as to what goes in the dairy industry. While I’m not vegan and eat meat and dairy, I definitely understand people who love animals enough to make that sacrifice.
Your fellow Michigander Jim Harrison describes them as milk and shit machines.
Hell out here in Montana we still write poems and songs in their praise!
I was accosted by some PETA butt heads while driving into the Clyde Beatty, Cole Brother circus with my wife and kids a dozen years or so ago.
They were complaining about the way the animals were being treated.
I told them “I hunt down, kill, gut, skin and butcher deer...These circus animals look like they are being treated just fine”.
What was the results of this ‘study’. Apparently you can get grants to study anything.
they left out the band castration
I’d keep eating. I like it rare, but not moo-ing.
Cattle have four “stomachs.” But they are actually four different digestive chambers, not really stomachs as such.
But while we’re at it, did these test subjects strip naked, defecate and urinate on themselves, and vomit their food back up so they could re-chew it?
Then I would suggest that they failed to achieve the “full bovine experience.”
We will fight for bovine freedom and hold our large heads high.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMbXvn2RNI
You *might* be able to afford filet mignon, *if* you can find a place that sells whole beef filets wholesale and you slice it into filet mingon yourself.
When I was in grad school and living in the Philly suburbs, there was a little store in Paoli that was the retail arm of a meat wholesaler and had cryovac beef filets at a per pound price below what the local IGA charged for ground beef. We’d buy one, slice it up, have filet mignon for dinner that night, freeze the rest, and have filet when we were low on money.
I mentioned this to my advisor, and he had a similar story from his grad school days: he bought a chest freezer in response to a promotion that promised to keep the freezer full of prime beef for the next, I think, three years (with some upper bound on the amount they’d provide). Whenever he and his wife were low on money at the end of the month, it was time to eat prime beef.
I would suggest the cattle prods on full, max settings, not just some ground vibrations. Then you’d probably have seen a much more realistic defecating and urinating seance, not to mention maybe a cure for liberalism.
I don’t give a damn how a cow feels, the only reason for their existance is to eat them!
Exactly. And not eating them is not going to bring the cow back, it would just mean they died for nothing.
RE: the only reason for their existance is to eat them!
How about milk?
They feel delicious.
Bad reading of a bad cow poem that you can’t hear any of anyway.
God Bless Montana!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d8ojebhZpc
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