When Cows Are Smarter Than Humans

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When the Cows are Smarter the Humans: An Argumentation essay on GM Foods Bevin Gammell Professor Boyd English 1301 9 April 2012 When a famer woke in Iowa woke to find that his cows had broken out of their peen he was mystified on where they could be: they weren’t in the fields of corn that he grew. When he looked past his field to his neighbors’ field, which grew corn as well, he saw his cows. The heard had walked through his field of corn leaving it untouched to consume his neighbors’ crop. What could the difference be between the two fields of corn? Well the untouched field of corn had been genetically modified with the BT, or Bacillus Thuringiensis, gene so that it would produce a toxin in the plant that would kill the corn borer. The debate over GM, or genetically modified, plants has been a debate driven by one of the most important things on this planet; the foods that humans eat. Before the 1970’s the only way to modify a plant was to cross breed for the specific characteristics that you wanted. It was a long and labor intense process that sometimes took decades to achieve the results that you wanted. The process changed when genetic engineering happened, now you could insert genes directly into the target organism, the process would only take years. Yet concerns have been raised by intrest groups and consumers, are the new “frankenfoods” safe to eat?(Posner,1) In today’s marketplace up to 70% of processed food is genetically modified for one purpose or another, and we are now just discovering the risks that they pose to our future. One argument against GM foods is that the modified plants will cross pollinate; breeding with non-modified crops and local fauna that cannot be regulated or controlled. As cross pollination can take place over large areas: “[n]ew genes may be included in the offspring of the traditional, organic crops miles away.”(Csanad,
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