I am not sure I understand why this is noteworthy. Some cattle has been cloned from dead animals and their offspring have entered the food chain. From the BBC report, “Cattle Cloned From Dead Animals:
The aim of livestock cloning is to clone the best animals to produce the best beef. But some cattle farmers believe it is impossible to pick the best quality animals until their meat has been properly analysed. That is why there are cloned bulls here that have been produced from the cells taken from the carcasses of dead animals. Brady Hicks of the JR Simplot company in Idaho said his organisation was among many that had tried out the technique successfully. “The animals are hanging on a rail ready to go to the meat counter,” he told BBC News. “We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it’s too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal.” These “resurrected” animals are then bred with naturally born cows. The next step is to see if their offspring – whose meat can be sold to consumers in the US – have the same qualities as the grandparent from which the cells were originally taken.
I am not sure why it is a story that some of the cloned animals originated from DNA of deceased animals. The very first born cloned mammal–Dolly–was cloned from a dead ewe whose mammary tissue has been frozen (hence, being named after the buxom Dolly Parton). But the fear that some cloned meat reached the UK made headlines there as some in the every panicky EU want to ban the sale of such meat in Europe altogether:
Cloning is not used by livestock farmers in Europe, and there are moves by some members of the European Parliament to ban it altogether. Mr Walton believes that would be a mistake. “If I were a European farmer and my competitors in the US, China and South America were using the technology, I’d be concerned about losing all access to it,” he said.
That’s always the argument used to justify overcoming every ethical and safety concern involving new technologies, isn’t it?
That said, I think cloning is merely another acceptable animal breeding technique–which is why we shouldn’t do it with humans. Now, one can reasonably not want to eat the flesh of animals that are the descendants of clones because it is not natural or for fear, unsubstantiated so far, that it could be somehow less safe than natural meat descended back to the dawn of mammals. (Eating such meant wouldn’t bother me, although I think there is a good argument for labeling.) But if we are disquieted about eating meat descended from clones, it shouldn’t be, it seems to me, because the original animal was dead when the cloning was conducted: It should be because the cloning was conducted.
August 15th, 2010 | 5:00 pm
Most of the oranges, and many of the potatoes we eat are clones. Same is true of many strains of apples. How about seedless grapes? They are clones too. Why should eating cloned animals raise more concern than eating cloned fruit? (My concern is quite different. If too many animals in the animal stock are clones, that increases the risk of a dreadful epizootic, similar to the plague of potato blight that destroyed the [cloned] potatoes of Ireland in 1845. But that is an economic risk for the farmer, not a health risk to the eater.)
August 15th, 2010 | 5:12 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys, Stand In The Gap. Stand In The Gap said: BIOETHICS WATCH => Cattle Cloned from Dead Animals: So? http://dlvr.it/3qqHs #912 #ocra #ucot #rs #tcot #tlot #sgp [...]
August 15th, 2010 | 8:16 pm
Jurassic Pork?
(sorry, had to do it)
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
August 15th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
padraig: Ha!
August 15th, 2010 | 10:23 pm
I have never understood why society is uncomfortable with eating products of cloned animals or their offspring, but is clamoring for human cloning to make stem cells that, in theory, will be directly injected. Especially the Brits who fund the cloning of human embryos with cow and rabbit eggs but balk at the idea of drinking milk from a cloned cow.
The disconnect is odd. It seems that cloning for food is bad, but cloning to live forever is good.
August 16th, 2010 | 1:58 pm
Here in the UK, most of the opposition to selling or eating meat from cloned animals (at least as expressed by the most articulate advocates on television) appears to be based on concerns for animal welfare. The argument is that the process results in a lot of suffering for the animals involved, embryonic wastage, genetic abnormalities etc
Rebecca: I suspect that the individuals who are comfortable with funding the cloning of human embryos are not the same ones who “balk at the idea of drinking milk from a cloned cow”.
August 16th, 2010 | 2:08 pm
Eric: Because, as should be obvious, farm animals typically do not propagate from cuttings. Cloning livestock is an ever so slightly different process from cloning plants, or so I hear.
August 19th, 2010 | 11:15 am
If the goal is reproduction of the desirable animal, it seems that harvesting and freezing semen prior to slaughter would be a heck of a lot cheaper. Of course, harvesting eggs isn’t in the same category, but I wonder how many female animals would be candidates for this in the first place.
Unless the goal is multiple cloning…but that kind of takes it out of the reproduction category, and into the production category.
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