ABSTRACT
One of the behavioural consequences for domesticated animals is that over many generations there has been an overall trend towards selecting for docility. Such animals are easier to control and so cheaper to rear.1 Domestication also serves as a useful metaphor for thinking about the narrow framing of ‘animal ethics’ when it comes to public and much academic discourse about farmed animals and biotechnology. Ethical thinking here appears as if disciplined in order to dissipate its unruly and disruptive potential. is is in contrast to the incredibly varied and fertile academic and advocacy eld of ‘animal ethics’ that has emerged over the last almost 40 years, itself tapping into much older traditions such as 19th-century writings on anti-vivisection and vegetarianism. Since I think it an important goal to open up technoscientic agricultural practices to as wide an ethical deliberation as possible, part of this problematic is to liberate this ethical richness into broader public ethical debate.
