You think chickens aren't engineered? American farm chickens are entirely different creatures than you'll find in parts of the world where the chickens are allowed to breed freely. Even on American farms the egg-laying chickens are very different from the for-meat chickens. The for-meat chickens, in particular, are bred to be very efficient at turning food into meat.
My tongue-in-cheek proposal was that we need to breed cows to use less energy in their day-to-day lives, so they can use that energy to produce more meat. Lots of their energy goes towards creating, fueling, and maintaining their legs so they can walk around, so that seems like the first thing that can go. We'd have to selectively breed the shorter cows, and keep going while their legs get shorter and shorter over the generations until they become too short for the cow to walk when it grows up. These essentially-legless cows can then be kept in cages.
The other thing cows spend a lot of energy on is their digestive system, which is the typical multi-chamber system needed for hard to digest grasses. Most American cows don't eat wild grass anymore (unfortunately), they eat what we choose to feed them. If we feed them easier to digest food, they don't need the complex stomach anymore. This is tougher to breed for, so some genetic engineering may be necessary to kick-start the process. But eventually we can get cows with minimal digestive systems that are only able to digest some kind of highly nutritious and easily digestible paste, which we can pump right into a tube in their neck since they're cage-bound anyway. So that'll reduce the energy they need for most of their digestive system, which can be diverted to producing more meat instead.
Now, at this point, their heads and tails aren't really of much use anymore, and eliminating most of their senses and higher brain functions would probably be a blessing...
You think chickens aren't engineered? American farm chickens are entirely different creatures than you'll find in parts of the world where the chickens are allowed to breed freely. Even on American farms the egg-laying chickens are very different from the for-meat chickens. The for-meat chickens, in particular, are bred to be very efficient at turning food into meat.
My tongue-in-cheek proposal was that we need to breed cows to use less energy in their day-to-day lives, so they can use that energy to produce more meat. Lots of their energy goes towards creating, fueling, and maintaining their legs so they can walk around, so that seems like the first thing that can go. We'd have to selectively breed the shorter cows, and keep going while their legs get shorter and shorter over the generations until they become too short for the cow to walk when it grows up. These essentially-legless cows can then be kept in cages.
The other thing cows spend a lot of energy on is their digestive system, which is the typical multi-chamber system needed for hard to digest grasses. Most American cows don't eat wild grass anymore (unfortunately), they eat what we choose to feed them. If we feed them easier to digest food, they don't need the complex stomach anymore. This is tougher to breed for, so some genetic engineering may be necessary to kick-start the process. But eventually we can get cows with minimal digestive systems that are only able to digest some kind of highly nutritious and easily digestible paste, which we can pump right into a tube in their neck since they're cage-bound anyway. So that'll reduce the energy they need for most of their digestive system, which can be diverted to producing more meat instead.
Now, at this point, their heads and tails aren't really of much use anymore, and eliminating most of their senses and higher brain functions would probably be a blessing...