Ai Hasegawa, a second-year student at London's Royal College of Arts, asks if women might consider gestating something other than human children in the future, for a project entitled I wanna deliver a shark.
Ai writes:
We are genetically predisposed to raise children as a way of passing on our genes to the next generation but we live in an age where the struggle to raise a child in decent conditions is becoming harder with gross over-population and difficult environmental conditions.We must also eat, and we are equally facing growing food shortages as a result of over-fishing, land use and a growing population. By giving birth to an edible animal it might place more value on that endangered species and help prevent it’s extinction. But, would raising this animal as a child change it’s value so drastically that we would be unable to consume it because it would be imbued with the love of motherhood?
It's an interesting idea. Although gestating our own food is a loss-making situation energetically speaking, there's a part of me that can see this catching on, in a kind of post-human world, not as a functional ecological practice but a emotional one. After all, why adopt an animal when you can create your own?
- Log in to post comments
Am I just stupid or is this a joke? What kind of demented person thinks of such a thing?
Reading this reminded me of Swift's Modest Proposal, which suggests, using quite rational arguments, that we eat our babies or sell them as food as a way of responding to overpopulation & food shortages. His ending disclaimer is that he did not have his own children so could not hope to profit from such a scheme.
Yuck!!!
As Gareth from The Office says: "Will there ever be a boy born, who can swim faster than a shark?"
Here's your answer.
It would be interesting if this was the solution to saving endangered species.