A pending decision by the Food and Drug Administration could allow the sale of meat and milk from cloned animals. It may solve a long-standing frustration for ranchers who can’t now reproduce their best steers, but it doesn’t mean you’ll find a cloneburger any time soon at the local bar and grill.
The FDA expects to release a draft of the new regulations by year’s end. Repeated studies by the agency “show that the meat and milk from cattle clones and their offspring are as safe as that from conventionally bred animals,” the FDA said.
Despite those studies, some modern Luddite groups oppose any cloning of agricultural products. But farmers have actually practiced “reproductive cloning” for thousands of years by using cuttings from plants to grow genetically identical offspring. Strawberries and some grasses even clone themselves naturally by sending out runners.
Only in recent years, however, has cloning technology reached the point where it can be used for cattle and other mammals. Still, at a price of about $20,000 per animal, cloning is far too expensive to be used to put food on your table. Instead, it will be used to reproduce breeding animals with highly desirable traits.
That could mean good news for the breeders of champion steers at state fairs or stock shows. Steers are castrated as calves, before their championship qualities may be apparent – an action that precludes breeding those qualities into future generations the way horse breeders can with prize stallions.
But with cloning, it’s literally possible for ranchers to breed their steers and eat them, too – since a few cells from the animal can be used to breed a new bull with the identical genes as the original calf.
“Cloning has the potential to be another reproductive technology our breeders can do,” says Leah Wilkinson of the National Cattleman’s Beef Association. “It allows you to essentially make a genetic twin of whatever animal you want. That allows you to, on a more consistent basis, take your healthiest, highest quality and safest line of beef to your consumers.”
Vegetarians and vegans (who shun even milk or eggs) can still marshall health and ethical arguments against eating animal products.
Cloned breeding stock certainly can’t dispel those basic concerns, but FDA studies have clearly shown that reproductive cloning itself in no way alters – for better or worse – the health effects of meat or dairy products.
