GMO's VS. Selectively Bread Animals

So you’re walking through a commercial cattle “ranch” and a cow that looks like an Arnold Schwarzenegger incarnate walks by you. The first thing that comes to mind is who in the world gave this cow steroids?! Well at least that’s what would go through my mind. So is this a actual cow? Is this just a dream, or did they just pump steroids into old Bessie?

To your surprise this is actually a real all natural bovine. This animal is just the result of selective breading; this is the process of choosing only the “best” of the animal you’re breeding to breed the other “best” (so with cows you find the “best” and breed him/her with the other “best”). So obviously there are benefits and concerns with this process. One benefit of this process is that you get more meat per cow, and you can house 3 cows instead of 10 cows and result with the same amount of meat. However people will argue that its just not natural or “right” to breed animals like this, and they often use the example that if humans didn’t interfere, you would not be finding cattle like this in the wild.

Now that we’ve gone over what selective breading is, lets move on to GMO’s or otherwise known as genetically modified organism. Basically this is when you take two different organisms, and “breed” them. For an extreme example theoretically you could breed a parrot and a kiwi, now even though I have no idea why you would want to do this, it could happen. Taking a genetic trait out of a fish that keeps it from freezing, and then inserting it into tomato plants to keep them from freezing as quick (which spoils them); so this would be a more realistic and actual example of GMO’s. There are also pros and cons to GMO’s, and they are also kind of obvious. A pro of GMO’s in my mind would be that like we’ve done with tomatoes, we can alter plants (or animals) to our benefit relatively easily. But with all things, there is always a bad side. Lots and I mean lots of people are really worried about cross breeding things that would never ever end up breeding, and the side effects of doing this.

So GMO’s or selective breeding, which one is worse? Personally I think society should be much more worried with GMO’s rather than selectively bread organisms. My first reason for this opinion is that selective breeding is practically natural; the only thing humans do is select who can breed with whom. On the contrary, GMO’s result from “breeding” that would’ve never happened and will only happen when humans manually take genes from one organism, and “put” them in another organism. In the article we read about these two things, the idea that GMO’s could potentially bring unwanted side effects to people that would’ve never occurred if the breeding was kept “normal”

If Gregor Mendel was alive currently I think he would be blown away with the application of his studies. When he first started his studies I don’t think he envisioned a day when buying “normal” food would be more difficult than buying GMO’s. So knowing these things, which are you going to worry about, GMO’s or selectively bread animals?