John Rolling: https://www.flickr.com/photos/greyhawk68/375189520 Does Neil deGrasse Tyson really think cows are unfeeling machines? Not really.

By Paul Shapiro

It all started with a tweet about cows.

First, some context: Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has many fans within the animal protection world. For example, he said in a recent Us Magazine interview that he eats meat only “once or twice a week, ” he’s tweeted about the astronomical number of chickens killed for food, and he even shot a video about how often humans underestimate animal intelligence.

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So naturally, there was some controversy among animal advocates when Tyson recently tweeted that “A cow is a biological machine invented by humans to turn grass into steak.” Responses varied, but probably the highest profile reaction came from celebrity musician Moby, who tweeted that Tyson sounds like “an ignorant sociopath.” (In all fairness, Moby later apologized, saying his tweet was “unnecessarily harsh.”) In response, Tyson offered a lengthier reply on August 18th explaining his thoughts.

As an animal protectionist of more than two decades, the controversy had me wondering: Is Tyson right?

If Homo sapiens “invented” cows, as Tyson suggests, we invented them in the same way we invented dogs. In other words, we took free-living animals (aurochs in the case of cows and wolves in the case of dogs) and selectively bred the ones with traits we valued, eventually changing their genome sufficiently over centuries to create new animals who we then considered domesticated. (We’ve done the same thing with just about every animal and plant we eat today, so in a sense we’ve done a lot of “inventing.”)

Instagram Moby is a passionate defender of animals and advocate for plant-based eating. He did later apologize for the final comments in his post, saying he was “unnecessarily harsh.”

To the extent that cows are “biological machines,” so then are all animals — Homo sapiens included. But animal defenders like Moby correctly recognize that unlike inanimate machines, cows—and all farm animals — are individuals with personalities, likes, dislikes, and the capacity to suffer. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton, a bust of whom sits in Tyson’s office at the Hayden Planetarium, felt similarly about animals. Voltaire wrote movingly about Newton’s deep “disposition to compassion” with regard to animals, noting that “he thought it a very frightful inconsistency to believe that animals feel and at the same time to cause them to suffer.”

On Tyson’s final point, it’s true in one sense that cows “turn grass into steak,” but that’s the same for any ruminant animal, from bison and antelope to deer and giraffes — humans didn’t invent that capacity. The problem is that cows just aren’t very efficient at doing it, and most of them are eating human-produced feed crops anyway.

In fact, funneling plants through cows to produce meat is so grossly inefficient — in terms of resource usage — that a team of researchers recently concluded that if Americans were simply to switch all of our beef consumption to bean consumption, we’d nearly meet all of our Paris climate goals without any other changes at all. This is why Tyson’s close friend Bill Nye the Science Guy recently commented on meat’s major role in climate change, concluding that “It’s very reasonable that all of us will move increasingly toward a plant-based diet.”

The reason so many animal advocates, Moby included, were upset by Tyson’s tweet is that, whether he intended it this way or not, he seemed to imply that cows are unfeeling machines whose sole purpose on earth is to serve humans as steak-producing factories. This is an issue on which astronomy luminaries Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan poignantly commented in their book, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors:

“Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.”

I have a strong feeling that Tyson agrees with Sagan and Druyan. In 2017, we should all be able to agree that animals are indeed capable of suffering and that their suffering matters. This is a big motivation for many people who are practicing the Three Rs: "reducing" or "replacing" consumption of animal products and "refining" our diets by choosing products from sources using higher animal welfare standards.

There is one suggestion that perhaps could go a long way toward solving this issue, though: In Tyson’s response to Moby he positively mentions the concept of clean meat (growing real meat without the animals), something that’s already moved from science fiction to science fact and may be commercialized in as little as a few years. (Full disclosure: I have a book coming out on the topic this January.) Considering Tyson’s interest in this development, perhaps he and Moby ought to get together to discuss the whole issue over a nice plate of spaghetti with clean meatballs.

Now that would be a conversation truly worth tweeting about.

Paul Shapiro is the vice president of policy engagement at The Humane Society of the United States and the author of the forthcoming book, Clean Meat . You can follow him at www.twitter.com/PaulHShapiro.