Pro+-+Cloning+of+Animals+for+Food


 * Would you eat cloned meat? More importantly, were you aware that since January 16, 2008 it has been declared officially safe to eat meat and drink milk from cloned livestock in the United States?

Though proven safe, some industry experts have serious doubts that consumers will be able to overcome feelings of queasiness from just thinking about eating cloned food (Samules, 2009).

The FDA has decided that since food from cloned livestock is as safe as that from conventionally bred animals, those products won't require special labels before they are put on sale. Other companies however, can make a request to the FDA to label their produces as clone-free (Samules, 2009). ** **By definition, a cloned animal is an exact genetic copy of its "parent." So logic would imply that th­e composition of its milk or flesh would be exactly the same as that of the animal whose** [|**DNA**] **scientists used to create it. To clone a specific animal -- say, a pig -- you take a donor egg from a female pig and remove the egg's nucleus, where the genetic information lives. You then insert the nucleus of a cell taken from another pig into the egg. The egg now contains the latter pig's DNA. An electric current then stimulates the egg to begin growing, and the result is a genetic copy, or clone, of that pig (Samules, 2009). ­**




 * **FDA has concluded that cattle, swine, and goat clones, and the offspring of any animal clones traditionally consumed as food, are safe for human and animal consumption.**
 * **Food labels do not have to state that food is from animal clones or their offspring. FDA has found no science-based reason to require labels to distinguish between products from clones and products from conventionally produced animals.**
 * **The main use of clones is to produce breeding stock, not food. These animal clones—copies of the best animals in the herd—are then used for conventional breeding, and the sexually reproduced offspring of the animal clones become the food-producing animals.**
 * **Due to the lack of information on clone species other than cow, goat, and pig (for example, sheep), FDA recommends that other clone species do not enter the human food supply (Samules, 2009).**