Just when you thought factory farming couldn't become more egregious, imagine the animals wearing Virtual Reality (VR) goggles to make them think their life is good when it's not.  What a twisted web of ethics this raises.

             Is it better for the animals to know they are being mistreated, or to trick them into thinking they aren't via VR?

             In Moscow, Russia, veterinarians have been testing VR goggles on factory farmed confined dairy cows and seeing significant increases in milk yield.  Innovation reports that a Turkish farmer in Aksaray, Turkey has repeated these Russian trials on his cows with amazing success.

             The VR goggles cover the cows' eyes and play pictures of green pastures and bucolic settings.  According to Izzet Kocak, the Turkish farmer, his test cows have gone from an output of 5 gallons a day to 7 gallons a day.  That's an amazing increase in production.

             Kocak is quoted as saying his desire was to figure out how to get more milk production without buying more feed.  Apparently happy cows produce more than unhappy cows.  And apparently cows care about where they think they live.

             Kocak is pleased enough with the experiment on two of his cows that he's ordering 10 more bovine VR headsets from Russia.  This could be a breakthrough export product for Russia to help its single-export petroleum market.

             If the numbers presented are real, I can imagine thousands of farms buying these bovine VR glasses.

             This whole development leaves me with mixed emotions.  If the VR headsets make the cows happier, who am I to oppose them?  But the real heartbreak is that with technology, we've given license to abuse the cows continually with a real life of which they are not a part.  It's almost like the matrix, where we live in a fantasy world and have no idea we're actually slaves in an abusive system.

             For sure, it indicates the innovation and cleverness surrounding methods to squeeze yet more out of the factory farming system rather than figuring out how to make the cows genuinely happy, in reality, in a more cow-friendly model. 

             Would you prefer to be exploited but not know it, or have your exploitation actually corrected?