Slashdot Mirror
FDA Decides Cloned Animals Safe to Eat
friedo writes "After five years of research, the Food and Drug Administration has decided that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe to eat. From the article: 'The government believes meat and milk from cattle, swine and goat clones is as safe to eat as the food we eat every day, said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine. Meat and milk from the offspring of clones is also safe, the agency concluded. Officials said they did not have enough information to decide whether food from sheep clones is safe. If food from clones is indistinguishable, FDA doesn't have the authority to require labels, Sundlof said. Companies trying to distance themselves from cloning must be careful with their wording, he added.'"
Well isn't it kind of obvious? I mean.. if the original is safe to eat and the clone isn't, doesn't that make it not a clone?
:D
I also wonder if there is much of a benefit to cloning meat anyway. I'm by no means an expert on clones but don't they take just as long as the "real thing" to reach maturity? I suppose they could only clone high quality animals for the best hauls of meat.. maybe I answered my own question. Any other ideas would be pretty cool though
Imagine a single cow that has favorable qualities for cloning - grows faster, has better meat yield.
Imagine that cow also has a hereditary problem that, when eaten, causes health problems in humans.
The cow by itself would affect a very small portion of the population.
Cloned, and undetected, it will affect many many more people.
This scares me a lot.
...is why this is even an issue.
A clone is an identical twin. The cow/sheep/dog/cat is still a cow/sheep/dog/cat, whether twinned or cloned.
The only difference is the method, with some methods being more successful at creating viable embryos than others.
An human grown from an in-vitro fertilized egg is no less human, is he/she?
A twinned human is no less human, is he/she?
A cloned human is no less human, is he/she?
The only stupidity surrounding this stems from bad science-fiction. George Lucas Must Die (hey, that sounds like a good schlock movie title)
If anyone disputes the above, I will have to ask you to step outside.
--
BMO
I've adopted my mom's hippie ways and regularly pay a little extra for organic, local food products.
And if your nice, long-haired organic-minded local farmer happens, after decades of work, to produce a bull that happens to routinely produce offspring that are efficient eaters, have strong immune systems, etc., you can bet that he'd be very happy to lengthen that bull's career by hatching out a couple of twin brothers to share the work. Cloning a stellar animal so that you can produce more later has nothing, whatsoever, to do with how organically (or not) you feed, keep, and eventually render the meat.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
What 'hereditary health problem that is harmful to humans'. I defy you to name a single hereditary, undetectable health problem in cattle that is the slightest bit dangerous. Wait! Wouldn't a defect that hurts humans also hurt/kill the cow? Because we have very similar biologies?
I don't know who is funnier.. you, unable to distinguish higher orders of animal life from an earthworm
Who made YOU God, that you can sit in judgment over our poor earthworms so? Where I come from, earthworms are what recycle all that vegetable matter back into the food chain. Without them, you wouldn't exist. Who is the higher life form NOW, Mr. Smarty-pants?
Remember, your worm is your friend!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"Meat and poultry will now have no variance at all. "
Ordinary "animal husbandry" has been going in that direction for decades (centuries? millennia?).
Given the choice, I'm sure the owner of the Springbank Snow Countess would have cloned her. Cloning is a shortcut.
What cloning *doesn't* do is introduce randomness. This can be a bad thing, because suppose Holsteins of the Springbank Snow Countess line were found to be vulnerable to a certain virus that targets the line, the only recourse would be to begin regular breeding again, but by that time, many other lines may have already died out through simple neglect.
An example is the Banana Crisis. The bananas you get in the supermarket are clones, every last one of them, though not in the bad science-fiction movie sense. But since every banana plant is reproduced asexually from a distinct line, diseases like Panama disease can run through entire populations, devastating farms and ultimately ending lines like the Gros Michel as a viable plant for which the Cavendish has been a suitable replacement.
Though, there isn't much of a replacement for the Cavendish at last check, except the FHIA-17, which tastes different (and both taste different than the Gros Michel).
There's nothing wrong with cloning for the end user/customer, but cloning sets up for some interesting economic effects should disease strike.
--
BMO
You can graze animals on ground that is rocky and hilly. You can not operate modern farm equipment there.
The best land usage is that we use the hilly areas for free-range grazing, the nice flat areas for growing plants, and various crummy areas for houses.
Of course, we do: use the nicest farmland for houses, ignore the hilly areas, and use the crummy-yet-flat areas to grow food for feedlot animals. Our usage of the best farmland for houses is probably the biggest environmental error we make; we are bound to this error by economic factors related to the "tragedy of the commons".
"Mad cow" disease is a basically a media hoax. How many people in this world have died to mad cow disease? Less the a hundred? You have a better chance of dying in a swimming pool, driving a car, riding a bike, or being struck by lightening. Seriously, you are far more likely to be eaten by a shark then killed by mad cow disease. People's sense of danger has been completely fucked over by mass media. The stuff that you should worry about is ignored, while stupid shit that isn't even worth noticing is treated like a sign of the apocalypses. Get a grip. If safety is what you really are worried about, you should be far more terrified of crossing the street, riding a bike, or taking a swim in a swimming pool, then worries about feeding sheep brains to cows.
As far as cloning goes... you are not going to die eating a cloned animal. It is going to taste delicious and tasty just like all the other cows. It is like eating a twin. "Unnatural"? Eh, maybe. Tender and delicious? Absolutely.
Alternately, as long as we're tossing around impossible-to-implement solutions, how about one where people just stop churning out children quite so often, and then we wouldn't have problems feeding everyone? If there weren't so many mouths to feed, the relative inefficiency and land requirements of a carnivorous lifestyle wouldn't be nearly as damaging. It's only when you start trying to scale it to billions and billions of people that it becomes a problem.
I'd rather have fewer people eating and living what and where they want, than more people fighting over the scraps.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I have exactly squat in the way of qualifications or higher education, and left home at 17 (no endless moochy moochy from parents syndrome here), I'm not a rocket scientist nor have I had inherited money to fall back on so I tend do be less than sympathetic to 'hard luck' stories from people old enough to be masters of their own destiny. Mostly people don't care. If you think that, try brutally kicking a dog in front of them or try and get them to watch a video of a slaughter house (cows, pigs, chickens) in action.
I bet good money they care and find it quite distressing, but as I've said, that they try not to think about it too much. So, while virtually everyone know what slaughterhouses are really like, great effort goes into not thinking about it and into justifying it that it's okay because they are "just animals" (who do that sort of thing to each other anyway) and that's somehow they are all totally divorced from exclusively humans feelings (like pain, fear, suffering). You see the same arguments over and over.
A while back, a TV station showed a country cook (a bit of a twat, by all accounts) taking in a "normal" family out for a weekend for some traditional country life, which included him trapping, skinning, cooking and eating a rabbit. The family on the screen (all lardy burger munchers) all accused him of being 'an animal' for being so barbaric, and the program generated record complaints, even though he wasn't the least bit inhumane about it. It was seen as unacceptably barbaric to *show* (even though far worse goes on behind closed doors).
I quite accept you might not care what happens to animals or even possibly other people - I've met several people with that attitude to animals and other people - it is sociopathic behaviour however (and generally frowned upon in western society). "I don't think anyone is claiming to be able to quantify life in a practical way (as if 1000 worms were equal to a single cow), but that doesn't invalidate choosing to be less, rather than more destructive" Where do you draw that line? You do realize the destruction caused in making your house, computer, clothes, etc. Wouldn't it be less destructive to just live on a farm and grow your own food? The answer is right there!
It might equally be phrased as:
"Just because you are not the re-incarnation of Jebus himself should not be taken as license to spend your entire life being a complete cunt to the rest of the Universe."
As a working example of the principle in action:
When faced with a scenario like "Do you want to order (a) the veal (b) the free range game bird or the (c) vegetable bake?"
(a) The answer Jason Voorhees would pick (this is only slightly better than "Just bring me a live baby and I'll drink blood straight from it's neck").
(b) A reasonable answer.
(c) Extra credit.