Lines in the sand: moving boundaries in the ethics of genome editing farm animals

Ethical debates on the use of CRISPR in animals have largely proceeded along separate tracks, focusing either on farm animals or on animals in the wild. We bring these discussions together in an empirical ethics study to examine how moral limits around genome editing are drawn, justified, and potentially eroded. Drawing on interview material collected in four citizen focus groups, one focus group consisting of farmers and 17 expert interviews, the article explores a recurring tension: CRISPR in production animals is often framed as a morally continuous extension of selective breeding – since the line has already been crossed, genome editing does not raise moral stakes that are principally new. Its use in wild animals, however, is approached as a more profound transgression, defensible only under conditions of ecological crisis or extinction. This contrast reveals a shifting normative landscape in which the boundaries of human control over animal life are continually redrawn. The article asks what work understandings of ‘the line’ does in moral reasoning about animals, and argues that appeals to continuity serve to normalize deeper forms of intervention into the lives of production animals and make us lose sight of the radical possibilities inherent in this technology.