EU Parliament Votes To Ban Cloning of Farm Animals 116
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.
What about pets? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is the govt going to tell us we can do that? WTF did they get the rights to tell us we can't have a clone of our pets?
What's the point of cloning a pet? (Score:5, Insightful)
What would be the purpose of a clone... if consciousness does not transfer?
Re:What's the point of cloning a pet? (Score:5, Insightful)
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's the point of cloning a pet? (Score:5, Interesting)
The only time I've seen it done well was in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where a long-ago duplicated Riker was discovered living in an abandoned outpost, where the issues of who could and should claim what aspects of life were debated. Both Rikers were indeed individual people at that point even if they started out as one.
Re:What's the point of cloning a pet? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right of course, but I wanted to add that a decent example of this was in a Michael Keaton comedy, of all places, called Multiplicity. The basic premise was he had too much to do, got a clone of himself to handle his job (architect or something), while he spent time with the wife and kids and still did some household chores.
Eventually, the original wanted more leisure time and created a second clone for the household chores. Ultimately, the architect copy became more manly (grunting, drank beer, roughhoused, deeper voice) and the household cleaner became more feminine. After a while, neither clone wanted to do the grunt work and they made a clone of a clone...which turned out to be less intelligent than the others.
Long story short, it showed how a clone (even though it had the same memories of the original up to the point of cloning) would eventually branch off and have their own experiences that shaped their needs and wants.
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Re:What's the point of cloning a pet? (Score:5, Informative)
Stuff and nonsense. A clone of you is simply an artificially produced identical twin (with an age difference). No more, no less. It is no more you than your identical twin would be.
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I suppose it might work if a clone can spawn and then re-merge, such that the original organism maintains all of the memories and learning exp
Paranoia (Score:2)
Sounds like somebody's played Paranoia - a Game where you're given a number of clones of your character. And there have been numerous games where all clones have died BEFORE leaving the starting room...
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The only time I've seen it done well was in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where a long-ago duplicated Riker was discovered living in an abandoned outpost, where the issues of who could and should claim what aspects of life were debated. Both Rikers were indeed individual people at that point even if they started out as one.
Farscape did a good (multi-episode) job of it too. I think there was still at least one consequence never quite cleared up at the end of the series from it, too.
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The sci-fi Sten series has a cool take on creating clones and the indoctrination process used on the clone to shape it's behavior.
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Re:What's the point of cloning a pet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also why not do it if for no other reason than attempting to determine how well it works or to improve techniques for carrying out cloning? If someone wants to pay to advance science, why stand in their way?
Re:What's the point of cloning a pet? (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a research exception. So doing it to see how it works (which has been done...) or to improve techniques is allowed.
What this law really is preventing is another situation like the collapse of the banana production in the 1950's: Bananas are seedless, so are grown from cuttings - essentially clones of single plant. In the 50's, there was a disease that spread that the then-popular type of banana was very susceptible to, which almost wiped out the entire industry. The industry switched to a different variety, but it's still just a vegetative clone, ready to be hit by one disease and wiped out again. Imagine that happening to chickens or cows, wiping out their respective industries, even for a year or two. It would be chaos.
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But Assassin's Creed tells us that we have genetic memory! That our entire lives' memory is encoded in our DNA and passed down through the generations! And with a fancy machine, our decendents can relive our memories, and those of our parents and grandparents too! Surely a genetic clone would have all those memories too???
Oh wait, it's a game, and not real at all.
This is the issue most people have with cloning - it's copying the physical form, not the memories, and not the personality. In order for "fav
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The Benne Gesserit were the same, right? All the females had all the memories of their antecedents? I may be remembering it very wrong as it has been a long time since I read the Dune series.
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Yes, you're correct. Those arrogant sisters that plagued me so could only see their maternal lineage thru Other Memory [wikia.com].
Re:What's the point of cloning a pet? (Score:4, Interesting)
These are pets. As long as the basic behavior traits are mostly the same, the owner will just project the details.
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Many dog personality traits are certainly the products of their environment. You might be able to replicate those experiences in a general sense to get more or less the same effect, but that would require years of training. And the dog would likely not have any of the less desirable, but individual traits that made him or her unique. In some cases the dog would be "better", but that might well generate a "Stepford dog".
In any event, considering all the work that goes into generating a personality, why bo
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What would be the purpose of a clone... if consciousness does not transfer?
If the pet was flash-fossilized, surprisingly the clone will inherit all of the previous pet's memories - including the ability to bark along with "I'm Walking on Sunshine".
pet cemetary (Score:2)
but seriously anything we clone now is not a replica in the way copying a computer file is. it may have the same physical looks, it may be dna identical, however it will not, it cannot be an exact replacement for a pet
I can see bad things if people do this thinking they will get their lovable pet back and find it to be a totally different animal
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Well, if you raised the animal the same as you did the first one, why would it not develop a personality at least similar to the original?
I know we don't have
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LOL ... only someone who isn't a parent, has never encountered children, was raised in a lab, AND was a single child could ask that question.
Animals don't develop personalities like that.
Hell, even human twins can have wildly different personalities. Animals born years apart are simply not going to have the same personalities.
It really doesn't work like that.
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Twins are still genetically different, with inherited temperaments for each that are distinct. I'm pretty sure an exact clone of a pet, raised the same way, would have similar temperament and behavior.
I'm not even sure "raising" is much of an issue. Cats don't really seem to have much long-term memory, just instincts... even very young kittens show personality which will develop over a lifetime.
Re:pet cemetary (Score:5, Insightful)
You are very wrong [drsophiayin.com]. 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.
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Why believe cats would represent dogs in terms of personality?
Dogs are social pack animals and tend to assimilate into the pack which they belong, basically learning pack behaviors and habits.
So if you raised a clone from a puppy in the same household using the same training you used to raise the original dog, it seems like it would be highly likely that it would have dogs which appeared to have similar personalities.
It may be that the cloned dog actually has a different personality but from the owner's per
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I used cats as an example because the comment I was replying to and the article I linked to both use cats as a primary example. However, it's only a primary example, and the article does go into a fair amount of detail on why many of the some effects are found in dogs. Please read it to have your questions answered.
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I think many folks would like to be able to clone a lost dog that was a dear pet.
Is the govt going to tell us we can do that? WTF did they get the rights to tell us we can't have a clone of our pets?
Current cloning technology does, not the government. Do you really want to see 9 of 10 attempts of cloning your loved pets to turn out horrible, and the last one to die within a year?
Re:What about pets? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What about pets? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
You're not off in left field. A cat may not even be the same color, technically. (The first cat cloned was a calico - it's clone was grey and white, no orange; orange is randomly activated during fetal development, and in the clone never activated, by chance.) I don't know if it'll go to that extreme in dogs, but again anything that's not a solid color tends to have color patches randomly distributed during development, so clones won't have the same pattern of colors unless the breed is single-color.
Personality is even more changeable - again the example of the first cloned cat: She was much more friendly to people she didn't know than her clone-mother was. (Probably due to being handled a lot more as a very young kitten.)
What about people? (Score:2)
Well. TFS and TFA don't mention the cloning of people, only of farm animals. So my Soylent Green factory is safe for now.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CC_%28cat%29 [wikipedia.org]
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Once you start cloning livestock, someone will find the ideal cow or pig that grows faster and tastes better than anything else. At that point, you have to have that cow or pig in or
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I think many folks would like to be able to clone a lost dog that was a dear pet.
Is the govt going to tell us we can do that? WTF did they get the rights to tell us we can't have a clone of our pets?
This is not 'the government telling us we can't do ...' some thing randomly. There are in fact very good reasons why we should not uncritically clone animals: our techniques are still very immature, and there are too many factors we don't understand well enough. If we could safely take a few stem cells and grow a new, healthy individual from them, like we can with plants, then perhaps it wouldn't be such an issue, but we can't at the moment. I bet you would have heard about it if we could - it would also me
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If it makes sense for a pet, then surely it makes sense for a child? Also who gave them the right to tell me I can't genetically modify my children, maybe I don't want them to need glasses and why not make them smarter while I'm at it?...
The fact that many people want something doesn't mean it should automat
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I don't really see a problem with that either..I mean, if you as a parent can prevent your child having physical and mental problems, why not? If you can give your child a leg up on others physically and mentally...why would you not want to and not be able to?
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Disappointing news (Score:2)
Re:Disappointing news (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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We can already make industrial quantities of wine and other beverages, and yet there are still people who will pay a stupid amount of money for wines and spirits that have been "aged" in a certain way or combined with exotic ingredients like "glacier water from the Himalayas".
So, it is easy to see how farmers could stay in business with actual cows, albeit not in direct competition with industrial farms because industrial farming will be dead and replaced by industrial vat protein production.
The traditional
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Humans have always behaved this way, during stone age britain a prehistoric miner could make a greenstone axe head in an hour or two. The axe head was then taken back to the village and polished by others for up to 1000hrs, greenstone was prefered because it is hard dense rock that doesn't shatter like quartz, and i
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This is, of course, conjecture.
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Really!? And there I was thinking tnk1 must have actually spoken to prehistoric man or read prehistoric man's lengthy manuscripts on the economic value of shiny axes.
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Uh-huh. Take Uncle Sam's dick out of your mouth and look around. Ever wonder where all those dollars the megacorps funnel through Ireland end up? Sure, they may at some point exchange them for your monopoly-money, but only to preserve the illusion.
You have the best governments money - Real money, good ol' American greenbacks - Can buy!
Another stupid AmeriKUNT butting in to a subject that she knows nothing about.
Spoken like the well behaved eurotr
So they banned something that doesn't exist? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Noone is going to clone for production
Think more along the lines of cloning a few a prized bulls, which can be worth over a million dollars each. More clones means more semen to sell, which can be worth thousands of dollars per shot.
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It's preventative to keep the Monsanto/BASF/Dupont seed thing from happening. Very few companies control all the seed stock in the world. This is to make sure that doesn't happen with animals.
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Actually, it would seem to be quite the opposite. This ensures that, once you buy a Monsanto bull, you won't be allowed to clone it.
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You know how you prevent that? By writing laws to explicitly prevent that. Laws that say that companies can't patent full organisms, or prevent farmers from breeding cloned animals, etc. This does nothing to really get to the issue.
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It's a very clever and forward thinking bit of legislation that will head off predictable problems down the line.
Eventually someone will figure out how to clone animals reliably and cost effectively. Commercial animal farmers will want to use the technology to reproduce the best milk giving and meat giving specimens. The problem is that if you have a large population of genetically identical animals they are vulnerable to disease. Genetic diversity is what protects populations from minor genetic defects bec
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The EU is doing nothing of the sort. This is frankenfood scare tactics. What they are actually doing is preventing better, cheaper products from reaching consumers.
Last time I checked, shelves were still crammed with bananas.
Ludism it's not just for industry anymore (Score:1)
It's incredibly ironic that the continent that gave us Malthus, chooses to ignore everything about how his prophecies were defeated.
World population is set to hit between 9 and 11 billion. Just how do they plan on eating if they are unwilling to improve yield.
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Ever heard of the Potato Famine? Where the lack of genetic diversity in a strategic crop had catastrophic effects the ripples of which are still being felt in the UK and beyond? Or how about whole strains of grape dying out causing a panic in France, changing the nature of French wine forever.
Imagine famine on an industrial scale because Monsanto Brand Cows are all equally susceptible to some new disease.
No thanks
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Ever heard of the Potato Famine? Where the lack of genetic diversity in a strategic crop had catastrophic effects the ripples of which are still being felt in the UK and beyond? Or how about whole strains of grape dying out causing a panic in France, changing the nature of French wine forever.
Imagine famine on an industrial scale because Monsanto Brand Cows are all equally susceptible to some new disease.
No thanks
You mean the way they have been for the past 70 years ?
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If you want to increase yield that much, there's a very simple way: Remove the animals. The amount of land required to grow feed for a farm animal could also be used to grow a lot more food than the animal produces in meat.
Humans need some meat to be healthy. But they don't actually need very much. The developed-world diet is very high in meat simply because it's very tasty.
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No, humans do not, in fact, require some meat to be healthy.
Sorry, but please don't just make up facts on the spot.
Someone will call bullshit on you.
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Ok, if you want to be pedantic, humans require some animal product to be healthy. Eggs and dairy suffice. Vegans know the importance of paying attention to diet to avoid various deficiencies, and may need supplements. Vitamin B12 is an important one.
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No, humans don't need meat to remain healthy. What we need is animal products, short of some genetically engineered yeasts used to make some supplements.
An egg or glass of milk(for those who are lactose tolerant) is perfectly sufficient.
On the other hand, a balanced diet of 'all' plant products is fairly hard. If you don't turn your nose up at organ meats, one based off of meat is easy.
the last paragraph is under-emphasized (Score:4, Informative)
Representatives from parliament will now negotiate with the European Council, made up of representatives from member states, on a final version of the regulation.
This makes it sound like a done deal, but it's closer to a situation where one house of the U.S. Congress has passed a law, and the other hasn't. It might pass, or might not, depending on what the other one thinks about it.
The way European politics works, moves like this require the agreement of both the European Parliament and the European Council. The European Parliament is directly elected, with representation roughly proportional to population, and its votes are a normal majority vote, like in most legislatures. The European Council is a body representing the governments of each country directly, and uses "qualified majority voting", which is a majority vote of countries (one vote per country) but with supermajority requirements on how many people those countries represent. Specifically, to pass the European Council, a proposal needs all three of: 1) a majority of countries in favor, 2) countries representing at least 74% of "voting weights" in favor (roughly proportional to population but with small countries over-weighted), and 3) countries representing at least 62% of the EU population in favor (a straight population weighting). In practice what this means is that at least 15/28 of the EU members have to support it, and the 15 in the majority have to include most of the large countries.
EU parliament vote to ban clothing of farm animals (Score:5, Funny)
Where is MOOOO cows when you need him? (Score:4, Funny)
Where is MOOOO cows when you need him?
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Like anyone wants a European clone anyway (Score:3, Funny)
Fucking cow would probably want a 4-day work week and a full month of vacation leave.
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And it would STILL be 50% more productive than an American one ...
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And it would STILL be 50% more productive than an American one ...
Because they send all the unproductive cows to the slaughterhouse.
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Why aren't other, non-human, animals entitled to live a good life?
Idea (Score:2)
nor does it prevent efforts to clone endangered species
*Sits pondering*
Hmm.
*Grabs truck full of poison and map of farmlands for the UK*
Don't worry, you'll be able to clone cows shortly! In fact you may have to.
A good idea. Think genetic diversity. (Score:2, Interesting)
For fuck sake this isn't about some Luddite scaremongering.
If all of your livestock share the same genetic makeup they will all share the same strengths.. And weaknesses. A disease could wipe out a country's entire cattle/pig/chicken/whatever population in a week.
Industrial ranching already creates the perfect storm of disease selection pressure and communicability. We pen those four legged meatbags in to the tightest, smallest possible space, stress them out, let them wallow in their own filth, feed them g
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Real reason? (Score:2)
So what's the real reason then, I assume just general unease with the concept? Some sort of slippery slope argument?
Because "claiming that only a small percentage of cloned offspring survive to term, and many die shortly after birth." sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would make the whole thing impractical in the first place, making the ban redundant.
And I don't suppose they will just lift the ban once research has solved these problems.
What happens when identical twins are born? (Score:3)
Would the family have to emigrate?
Now consider that IVF fertility technology increases the number of multiple births. Would this become illegal under the new rules?
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Would the family have to emigrate?
Now consider that IVF fertility technology increases the number of multiple births. Would this become illegal under the new rules?
Only if you are raising the twins for meat...
What are they trying to solve here? (Score:3)
If it is true and there is a low expectation of survival, then it isn't very economical to clone for non-research purposes. Is this really a wide spread problem?
As much as having genetic diversity help in disease resistance, we already heavily do cloning on plants. Pick any species of apple in the super market and you will find that all the apples there are clones of each other even if they were grew in different places.