Clones as Food

The use of cloned animals as food raises not only health and safety issues but also serious ethical issues. Ethical concerns can easily intertwine with and amplify food safety concerns. Proponents of the use of animal clones as food point out that there is no “new” substance placed in them thus the irrelevance for testing. They differentiate cloning from genetic engineering which involves adding or taking away genes. They believe that cloning does not change the gene sequence thereby posing no expected problem.

There is now the question of why livestock breeders cannot settle for the use of more conventional means of breeding food animals. The whole point of cloning is increasing the number of breeding animals with naturally occurring desirable traits. However, whether cloned animals are acceptable to food consumers or not is an altogether different matter.