EU Parliament Votes To Ban Cloning of Farm Animals

sciencehabit writes: The European Parliament today voted to ban the cloning of all farm animals as well as the sale of cloned livestock, their offspring, and products derived from them. The measure, which passed by a large margin, goes beyond a directive proposed by the European Commission in 2013, which would have implemented a provisional ban on the cloning of just five species: cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, and horses. The supporters of the ban cited animal welfare concerns, claiming that only a small percentage of cloned offspring survive to term, and many die shortly after birth. The ban does not cover cloning for research purposes, nor does it prevent efforts to clone endangered species.

Comments

What's the point of cloning a pet?

[Lead Butthead]

What would be the purpose of a clone... if consciousness does not transfer?

Re:What's the point of cloning a pet?

[Daniel_Staal]

Exactly how many people do you think you could scam out of a few thousand dollars by cloning their cat or dog before they realized that? That's your purpose.

Re:What about pets?

[Fire_Wraith]

Most people also have a crazy/wrong idea about what cloning is. It's not going to give you a carbon copy of your pet, all it gives you is an identical twin. I also seem to recall hearing that with some animals a twin won't even look the same due to things like color pattern being influenced by its time in the womb, but I could be completely off in left field with that. Regardless, you're just getting another pet with the same DNA makeup.

And really, so much of the anti-cloning hysteria comes from that sort of wrong-headed thinking, that's there's something horribly unnatural or mad-science-y about cloning, when nature makes clones all the time - it just doesn't time-shift them.

So they banned something that doesn't exist?

[Wycliffe]

From the summary: "only a small percentage of cloned offspring survive to term" and they didn't ban it for research.
Noone is going to clone for production until they can get a large percentage of clones to survive and there is some
cost advantage. They didn't ban researching it so basically this sounds like a feel good piece of legislation that does
very little except complicate things.

Re:Disappointing news

[pla]

Jokes aside, I seriously suspect that as the real driving force behind this ban.

Within a decade, the bulk of the meat industry could become an effectively animal-free industry generating product in vats rather than on pastures. You know that the livestock/husbandry industry has to see that as nothing short of an existential threat.

I'd love to see where the dollars came from to promote this ban. I'd put good odds that it comes from exactly the industries it supposedly regulates.

Re:pet cemetary

[Daniel_Staal]

You are very wrong. The first cloned cat wasn't even the same official color as their genetic parent - and the researchers considered their personality differences even more pronounced, largely due to how they were raised.

How cats are raised and treated makes a very big difference in their behavior. Even such things as where they were in the womb makes a big difference.

And an identical twin isn't genetically different - that's why you clarify identical vs. fraternal twin. They are very different - both in humans and in animals - but genetically if they aren't the same they aren't an identical twin.