Ethics and the issue of genetically engineering other animals in the twenty-first century

This project analyses legal, academic and popular texts to establish how governing bodies uphold biotechnology’s semiogenic construction of other animals as parts in the machine of conservational, biomedical and agricultural innovation. The first chapter provides a literature review demonstrating that the exclusion of nonhuman animals from ethical and legal consideration is not a natural inevitability, but a historically contingent outcome of Western metaphysical, juridical and epistemological traditions that privilege human exceptionalism. Through critical engagement with continental and poststructural philosophy, feminist ethics, biopolitical theory and critical animal studies, I show how anthropocentric logics structure dominant political, legal and scientific discourses in ways that render nonhuman animals as both ontologically absent and materially vulnerable. Through a critical examination of the legal, institutional and discursive frameworks that govern animal biotechnology in Canada and the Unites States, chapter II indicates how biotechnology is facilitated by a regulatory architecture that systemically abstracts nonhuman animals into categories of utility –rendering them interchangeable, deracinated “living organisms” or “biological products” devoid of sentience, emotions, subjectivity or other vestiges that influence moral standing. Chapter III and IV’s case studies on AquaBounty’s genetically engineered AquAdvantage® Atlantic salmon and Revivcor’s genetically engineered GalSafe® pigs illustrate my assertion that the transgenic nonhuman animal stands as a paradigmatic figure of biopolitical capture: a life molecularised into genomic code, patented as intellectual property and legitimated through a rhetoric of human necessity. These two case reports contextualise the way legislation and regulation actively contribute to directing our food and medical systems towards novel forms of nonhuman animal exploitation, invigorating the animal-industrial complex’s breadth by innovating its expansion. My conclusion pieces together how governance over animal biotechnology and its legitimising of nonhuman animal gene modification depends on a strategic affinity between scientific genetic determinism –the kind that positions humans above other species as an inherited and biological given– and neoliberal policy. This dissertation contributes to literatures concerned with scientific innovations that impact nonhuman animal lives on scales that are cellular and generational, material and ideological.