(Sandøe 2010). It is possible to import new genetics, for
example, and to greatly increase the range of mutants that
selection has to work on. We can keep animals alive that
would die in nature (such as ones that need our help in
mating) and there is also a sense that we are beginning to
literally go back to the drawing board and ‘design’ animals
for the goals we want. We can hope to produce animals with
traits and combinations of traits that could in the end be
successful and have high welfare, but which would never
have been possible in the wild.
But this very power to overcome some of the constraints
that have operated through billions of years of natural
selection should not blind us to the constraints that are
still present and that may still mean that achieving all the
goals we might want to is not possible, certainly in the
short term and possibly in the longer term too. At least in
the short term, we are limited by current ignorance of all
the effects that a given gene, even one with supposedly
desirable effects, might have. In the short term, and
possibly in the long term too, we may have to make
difficult ethical choices and decide our priorities between
different goals. If environmental