Animals that feed themselves

As you can see, we haven't gotten around to training them to be obedient. Yet. That's the next step. Domestication is different from obedience and what we have achieved is what people have only dreamed for thousands of years, and we are the first ones to do it. Our names will be written in history books, and you can be sure about that. This is the fastest, cheapest, easiest way to rear large herbivores, and you can bet that they are the most efficient forms of meat compared to pretty much everything humans have reared. Ever. Dr Murgram finished his speech. He had done it dozens of times, practiced it in front of the mirror last evening too but every time was something different, you felt their doubt within you, their questioning gaze, their non-believing attitude.

So how expensive is it going to be compared to chicken, the journalist in the blue cap asked.

Let me put it this way. The worst-treated chicken, in absolute rubbish conditions that tastes like wood, whose legs are unable to support them, well that chicken is going to cost more in terms of impact to the environment and resource consumption compared to these beasts. And mind you, they eat everything, you don't need expensive specific diet like meat chicken, he said, tapping against the glass of a showcase that showed all the different potential food sources.

And is the cost for right now, or is that a projection, the journalist asked.

Well as you can see, we have gotten within the general price level to be able to compete with other cattle, but no as of right now we've not gotten that efficient yet. To get to that level, we need a larger level of investment so we can breed more efficient breeds, which can forage for themselves. There's also the possibility of autosynthesizing cells Dr. Samudra and her team have been working on. At which point you wouldn't need to care for plants anymore. As long as you have sufficient water, and necessary base minerals, certain parts of the body can produce their own food, and make it available to the rest of the system for metabolism. The only problem we have faced there is that the cells seem to grow too slow to be of any use. There are growth accelerators that we are experimenting with, but we want to be sure they're absolutely safe for human consumption before we bring it out to the market, he said.