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.