I N   V I T R O    Issue 2.10 - October 1996

Bison Heretic

By Oliver Morton



Mankind lives off animals. It eats them, it experiments on them, it keeps them for pets. Until recently, it used them as its primary transport systems. The Bison Heretic, a conceptual design by Max Berman, is a way of asking what the limits really are to the use of animals for human convenience. Berman's design is a light, two-wheeled chassis for personal transport powered by a bioengineered, prong-horn deer. The engineering has reinforced the deer's rear legs, and removed all the higher functions of its mind - it neither has consciousness nor feels pain. Fuel is a nutritious slurry dispensed at filling stations. Exhaust is CO2 and shit. The "engine unit" is kept in a buffered saline solution to prevent blistering and sores, and replaced every few years.

Berman's idea - not a proposal - is meant to ask people how far they would go. If people are willing to pollute the atmosphere and risk the future for a motorcycle, why should they not enslave a lobotomised deer to the same end? The lack of reverence for nature in the Bison Heretic may be more striking, more shocking - but is it really any more profound?

Oliver Morton is the editor of Wired.