From a justice point of view, you should never be industry-led on something that is this ethically problematic.
New legislation allowing the gene editing of farm animals could be approved for England in the coming weeks after researchers have tested the practice on pigs, chickens, sheep and cattle.
Efforts to introduce animals that have undergone "precision breeding" into agricultural and food systems are being hailed by supporters as advances that will unlock growth, control disease and boost food security.
This story was produced in conjunction with the investigative agency AGtivist.
Critics believe the technology will introduce new welfare risks for farm animals and distract from the need to resolve existing abuses inherent in intensive livestock farming.
Manipulation
Work by one New Zealand NGO suggests public reporting of animal gene editing research could help the public decide whether the risks outweigh possible benefits.
Legalising the gene editing of farm animals in England would essentially allow companies to sell livestock with specialised traits, such as resistance to a disease or the absence of horns. The proposed act of Parliament will not apply to Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
These traits will have been achieved by making changes to animals’ DNA using a gene editing tool such as CRISPR. England currently allows the gene editing of plants but has not yet authorised the sale of gene edited farm animals.
In New Zealand, a country with comparable positions to the UK on animal welfare, close scientific and research partnerships and similar apprehensions about editing farm animal genes, a long-running battle between GE Free New Zealand and a government-owned animal gene modification research facility ended last year with the facility’s closure.
From a justice point of view, you should never be industry-led on something that is this ethically problematic.
The NGO believes obliging the AgResearch Ruakura Animal Containment Facility to produce publicly available annual reports describing its work helped end its animal gene manipulation trials and shutter the operation in June 2025. The requirement to produce the annual reports followed a court case against Ruakura brought by the NGO.
Psychology
In Ruakura’s 2023 annual report, one of the simplest in a long series which vary in style and are listed on the GE Free New Zealand page, questions include: “Did the manipulations go according to plan Yes or No?”
And, if “the manipulations did not go according to plan” the researchers must explain the adverse effects on animal welfare. Examples of adverse effects in the report include a gene edited calf born blind, possibly, it says, due to an unintended consequence of the gene edit.
Claire Bleakley, the president of GE Free New Zealand, condensed AgResearch’s annual reports into two of her own summaries. She told The Ecologist the reports show gene edited livestock suffering from chronic foot problems, pneumonia, respiratory issues, fused organs and deformities.
Bleakley is an organic farmer with a bachelor’s degree in science and psychology and livestock of her own. She describes in her most recent summary the Ruakura trials as consistently failing “to deliver viable, healthy animals that would have commercial benefits.”
Bleakley sent her first summary to the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and is considering whether to send her second one. DEFRA did not confirm whether it had received the report.
Data
Asked if she would draw a line from the transparency afforded by the publicly available annual reports, her summaries of them, and the eventual closure of Ruakura, she said yes.
Basically, she said, her summaries, and the attention they received, put New Zealand’s Environmental Protection Agency and its Animal Ethics Committee “on notice” and suggested they were not doing their job.
Nick Barraclough, chief legal counsel for New Zealand’s Institute for Bioeconomy ScienceLtd., into which AgResearch was absorbed in July 2025, said Ruakura’s closure was the result of a “planned future development.” He added that no replacement for AgResearch Ruakura was expected.
Mark Stevens has served as the interim director of the UK’s Roslin Institute, which is part of the University of Edinburgh, and has used gene editing to produce pigs resistant to a common and costly pig virus.
He agreed it would be possible for the Institute to produce these kinds of annual reports as most of the data is already collected. He agreed that being more transparent about animals used in research would be positive.
Altered
He stressed that the purpose of Roslin’s research was “to enhance the welfare of farmed animals, in particular by conferring resistance to infectious diseases that affect millions of animals in the global food system".
However, he added that putting that information in the public domain was something that would need consideration on several levels, including what data might breach commercial confidentiality because Roslin works in collaboration with commercial companies.
These companies include Genus plc for gene edited disease resistant pigs and Cobb-Vantress on research aimed at gene editing chickens to be avian flu resistant.
Stevens confirmed that Roslin is the only UK organisation actively genome editing – another term for gene editing - farm animals.
In 2025 the number of genetically altered animals born into Roslin’s care stood at 925 chicks, 46 sheep and 70 pigs, he told The Ecologist. Having seen the GE New Zealand summary, he underlined that the animal “issues identified” in it “do not reflect our experience at Roslin".
Research
John Hammond is the incoming Roslin director, and is currently research director at the Pirbright Institute. He deferred to Stevens when asked whether Roslin might produce New Zealand style annual reports. Pirbright focusses on viruses that spread from animals to humans and does not gene edit animals other than insects.
Christine Tait-Burkard, a senior research fellow at Roslin, and Simon Lillico, a Roslin research scientist, were similarly against the idea of producing publicly available annual reports.
For Lillico, the answer was a clear no, mainly because that type of reporting is already carried out and delivered to the government. “All procedures performed on research animals in the UK are carried out under license from the Home Office, with additional approval from an Animal Welfare and Ethical Review Body, and data related to the lifetime experience of each animal is already collected and returned to the Home Office on an annual basis,” he said.
Lillico added that he was “surprised that AgResearch experienced so many adverse effects associated with gene editing research. This has certainly not been our experience.”
The total number of animals used in scientific research are published annually by the University of Edinburgh and the UK Home Office along with non-technical summaries of licenced projects.
Transparency
Tait-Burkhard said annual reporting would be a problem for gene editing projects that can take years, and argued that if researchers were to “disclose what we are working on (as would be necessary to provide context to a report) then we run the risk of getting scooped by other laboratories particularly in overseas countries.”
She too said that she had not seen “any adverse consequences” from gene editing procedures and that “health issues do not occur often and do not differ from expected rates in standard husbandry.”
DEFRA did not immediately respond when asked if it would consider requiring similar annual reporting from gene editing facilities in the UK.
Peter Stevenson, the chief policy advisor for Compassion in World Farming, said he would “totally support gene editing research institutes being required to produce regular annual reports for the public and in particular being required to answer the questions about adverse animal welfare effects.”
Penny Hawkins, head of the RSPCA’s animals in science department, was similarly supportive of public annual reporting by farm animal gene editing facilities, starting: “I think those kinds of reports would certainly be beneficial for transparency.”
Eating
She added that direct benefits for animal welfare would only accrue if “the reports led to better processes for ethical decision-making around the purposes of gene editing, and a more robust harm-benefit analysis with respect to proposed projects” by regulators like the UK government’s Animals in Science Regulation Unit.
She said the reports would be useful for various reasons from an RSPCA point of view, including informing policy and strategy, and responding to government consultations.
She said her greatest fear is that all the ethical and welfare issues “will just be swept under the carpet and gene editing animals will be seen as the answer to all sorts of veterinary, housing, husbandry problems, even climate change.”
But why, she asked, “should it be the animal who is fundamentally altered in that way” instead of encouraging humans to change their eating habits?
A 2023 report by the UK’s Food Standards Agency found that consumers tended to have “low awareness” of gene editing, and 75 per cent had not heard of it.
Sperm
Without more transparency, like that provided by New Zealand style annual reports, the fear is consumers will remain in the dark about current research on farm animals and what that might mean for their food in the future – a gap that could be compounded by government plans to avoid labelling that would tell consumers whether they are eating gene edited animals.
The advocacy group Beyond GM has initiated a legal challenge against the moves to commercialise gene edited farm animals in England, with the case due to be heard by the High Court in London in May.
The case focuses on recent regulations introduced under the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act of 2023, which advocates say remove transparency and labelling requirements for gene edited plants on farms and in food.
The European Union has so far demonstrated a reluctance to allow the use of what it calls New Genomic Techniques, a term that includes gene editing, for farm animals, and has raised concerns about difficulties that England’s non-alignment with the rest of the UK and EU could pose for trade.
Beyond the risks to animals in research facilities, there are a range of other question marks around the welfare of gene edited animals once they, or materials such as sperm and embryos, are available for sale to farmers.
Tolerance
The greatest of these is that the industrial farming sector will exploit the power of gene editing in the same way it uses selective breeding: to boost production of meat, milk and eggs, a process, welfare experts say, that has already resulted in chickens too breast-heavy to walk, lameness and mastitis in dairy cows and the production of more piglets than a sow has teats to feed them.
Selective breeding involves choosing animals with desirable traits and breeding more of them over time.
Stevenson added: “It's very clear from the industry that one thing they want to do with gene editing is to push animals to higher productivity, faster growth, higher milk yields.” This could increase the existing harms done to animals by selectively breeding for greater productivity.
Craig Lewis is the north Europe commercial director for the Pig Improvement Company, the swine division of Genus plc., and serves as chair of the European Forum of Farm Animal Breeders.
He believes gene editing will be used to improve disease resistance and climate tolerance. He said of both selective breeding and gene editing: “It's not so much the process or the tool, it's what you're doing it on and why.
Unintended
“So if you start thinking about gene editing in the context of growth rate … [and if] you made animals grow faster in an isolated sense, then of course you could have the negative consequences on welfare, like more animals getting lame because maybe their bones or whatever can't keep up with the growth rate.”
But farmers aren’t going to do that because there is “no point adding more growth if the animals are going to get lame or there's no point adding another piglet if it's not going to get weaned,” he said. He also highlighted an EFFAB code of practice that encourages responsible breeding.
Lillico also believes that farmers will not adopt gene editing to increase productivity, because standard selective breeding “is very good at improving production traits, many of which are influenced by multiple genes, so this is an unlikely use of gene editing.”
The view from Roslin’s incoming director was slightly more nuanced. Hammond believes most farm animal gene editing will aim to increase overall productivity, and by that he means there are opportunities to develop animals with better disease resistance, increased tolerance of hot or wet conditions and better or healthier output for less feed input, all of which will boost productivity writ large.
Another uncertainty facing gene edited farm animals are the unintended consequences of an edit.
Commercialisation
Friends of the Earth US will state in a new report that it has found that unintended “genetic changes from genetic engineering pose significant animal welfare concerns.”
These include “health problems such as weakened immune systems, developmental abnormalities, reduced fertility, chronic pain, or increased susceptibility to disease. In some cases, animals may experience higher rates of deformities or metabolic disorders that compromise their quality of life."
Dana Perls, a senior food and technology campaigner with Friends of the Earth US, pointed to the example where gene-edited dehorned cattle has been accidentally contaminated with antibiotic resistant lab material which was discovered more by chance than design.
"There happened to be a researcher who wanted to do a full genome assessment, which isn't always required.” The discovery that the cattle were antibiotic resistant was “sort of an accident”.
Lewis argues that many gene editing risks are related to the development or research phase, rather than the deployment or commercialisation phase, when they are sold to farmers.
Ideas
A lot of the problems seen in the New Zealand annual report, he added, “are things noted during the development phase. As such if negative things are seen then there would be no continuation to deployment.”
There are also fears that ‘good’ gene editing - such as dehorning, which eliminates the need for painful horn removal could encourage poor practice.
An earlier report from Friends of the Earth said pigs being gene edited for disease resistance or hornless cattle being packed into more even crowded enclosures could “perpetuate poor animal management, particularly in intensive farming operations…compounding existing welfare concerns.”
Melanie Challenger is the author of How to Be Animal and a researcher on the history of ideas. She is a member of Animals in the Room which is trying to design new ways to include the desires of animals about the processes that affect them.
Deliberation
She has argued that even if animals were only edited for disease resistance or to remove horns, there are broader moral and ethical issues to consider, particularly when there is a profit motive driving an animal breeding sector keen to sell its products.
She said: "From a justice point of view, you should never be industry-led on something that is this ethically problematic.”
Instead, her view is that any decisions around gene editing farm animals should involve “much more deliberation, much more public involvement in decision making” and the animals themselves.
“I think they need to be more substantively made present in a decision like this than they are at the moment.”
Consume
Another argument against gene editing is simply to skip it and focus instead on encouraging governments to support a different set of commercial interests.
The government could support companies like Ivy Farm in the UK and UPSIDE Foods and Wildtype in the US that are working to grow fish, chicken and other animal proteins from cells, ending the need for the intensive production of livestock.
Peter Singer, the philosopher and author of Animal Liberation and Animal Liberation Now, was asked by The Ecologist if it would be better to focus on scaling up cultivated animal protein production for mass consumption, rather than gene editing food animals. “Yes," he replied. "Emphatically.”
He added: “Raising animals for food will always be inefficient, because the animals have to consume more food than they yield. They also emit greenhouse gases, and increase pandemic risk, and then there is the vast quantity of suffering inflicted on them.”
This Author
Sophie Kevany is a freelance journalist writing for The Guardian, Sentient Media and other publications. She previously worked for Dow Jones and Agence France Presse (AFP) and has a master’s in journalism from Dublin City University. She has lived and worked in Ireland, the US, South Africa, France, Peru and Spain.
This story was produced in conjunction with the investigative agency AGtivist.
