New Orbit Magazine Issue 08; Feb 2020, The Future of Animals

they'd do exactly as they were told until given
another task, or they ran themselves to
exhaustion. A row of nine of them sat
peaceably on eye-level pedestals,
unsupervised, in order to showcase all of the
available colour variations (Black and white,
red and white, blue and white, red merle,
blue merle, black tricolour, blue tricolour,
red tricolour, and new-this-year edition of
blue merle tricolour, too), while an tenth and
eleventh joyously performed a complicated
agility course as if on a loop. A twelfth was
playing IQ games with members of the
crowd. Each of these display dogs – who were
all at their glossiest and prettiest and most
physically fit, at about nine months old – had
been fully trained in only a couple of months,
ready to perform their skills for prospective
suppliers. They weren't for sale – with a pang
of emotion, Jemima was forced to confront
that they’d each likely be destroyed before the
next year’s convention, unless one of the staff
members had taken a particular liking to one
and preferred to adopt it – but the highly
intelligent and, above all, easily trainable
traits that were on display were entirely
encoded within the gene packages that the
suppliers were clamouring to buy.
How they used those codes was largely up
to them. CCI collected a yearly fee from
suppliers, as well as a tiny commission per
animal sold. Considering the heritable good
behaviour, families could handle having two,
three, or even more Dogs at a time – and
given that each of them was engineered to
live no longer than nine years, this
commission added up to a considerable
amount over time.
Jemima turned away from the Border
Collies as the chill that always accompanied
the more sinister aspects of her profession
settled over her for a second. Almost all of
the suppliers that purchased gene codes
today would be taking them home – in the
form of a stable of bitches and vials of donor
sperm on ice, to formulate a healthy breeding
population – to basements and warehouses
where these Dogs – products – would become
little more than part of a factory assembly
line. Most of their puppies would be fine,
sold off spayed and neutered to households
who are intentionally none the wiser, but a
select few will always be caught in the gears of
the puppy mills behind the scenes.
Well, it was that or losing the species, right?
For the first few hours, the convention
didn't require a great deal of overseeing. CCI
was the biggest companion animal
organisation on the planet by miles, and