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US FDA Deems Cloned Animals Edible

Posted by kdawson on from the just-like-the-real-thing dept.

Coldeagle sends us the news that the US Food and Drug Administration has declared that meat from cloned animals is safe to eat. The agency decided that no labeling is necessary for meat or milk from cloned cows, pigs, or goats or their offspring. (Ironically the FDA didn't include cloned sheep in the announcement, claiming a lack of data, though the very first cloned animal was a sheep named Dolly.) The article notes that a couple of major food suppliers have already decided not to use any products of cloning, and that the groups opposed to cloning in the food chain will now concentrate their efforts on convincing more suppliers to boycott the business of cloning. The FDA noted that their focus groups and other public input indicated that about 1/3 of US citizens do not want food from cloned animals under any circumstances; another 1/3 have no objections; and another 1/3 fall somewhere in between.

2 of 598 comments (clear)

  1. OT: 25 replies? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    WTF? Every topic on the main page has "25 comments", and the drop-downs that enable non-logged-in users to change from Threaded->Flat (and the other drop-down to set the Threshold) have vanished.

    What's going on, and is there any way of stopping it? /. used to gracefully fall back to the classic system for non-Javascript-enabled browsers, and used to be usable from within on Lynx. It now fails... ungracefully.

    Any chance we could revert whatever change happened today?

  2. You're confused by Pentagram · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    ALL animals have very similar thoughts and receptors to our own.

    No they don't. Are you suggesting that an ant has the capability for abstract thought?

    Things like fear and pain are primordial and necessary for any survival.

    Kind of. Any sufficiently advanced animal is likely to have mechanisms for avoiding damage and evading threats. That does not mean they are consciously aware of those things however. There are only a small number of species which we have good reason to believe have consciousness.

    The only thing we think we have over animals is reason (though the lack of communication is probably what is the barrier here)

    "Animals" is far too broad a term to discuss in this sense. "Reason" isn't a well-defined term, but as I would define it, there are animals which can reason to an extent (e.g. chimps), though I would guess that chickens can't. Your average fish can't "reason" -- they're just too primitive.