The Same Old Questions

The FDA, I hear, has decided that cloned beef, pork, and goat is fit for human consumption and can be sold without any special labels. This has gotten some people quite upset, and I'm not quite sure why. Maybe there's chemicals involved, or something like that.

Now, I admit there's something of an "eww" factor, but there has to be more to it than that. We've been cloning plants for years, eons even, and I've never heard so much of a peep about that. My grandmother, a saintly woman if ever I knew one, would regularly go on walks around the neighborhood, collecting "slips" from plants she wanted to grown. Once she got them back here, in a few months we'd have a genetically identical plant growing in our own yard.

Okay, maybe the neighbors could complain about that, but they never did. They never caught her, either, which may have something to do with it.

As to these cloned animals, I should admit that I'm no rancher. Nor am I a biologist or dietitian. I have, however, seen my fair share of ads, movies, and TV shows where they show those fast-talking auctioneers, the kind they have at cattle and sheep auctions. I once spent an afternoon in a sheep tent at a county fair where I learned that the 4-H kids use Woolite to wash their sheep, but I'm not sure that's relevant here.

These cloned cattle, for instance, go for around five to ten thousand a pop, which I don't think is cheap. There's no reason to believe, now, anyway, that anyone is going to be buying any cloned steer and slaughtering it, not for that initial cost. I have no idea what a calf usually goes for, but I doubt it's this kind of serious money.

What I'm suspecting is that the animals chosen for cloning are especially good at producing milk, impregnating, or something like that. Or, they could have especially supple hides. What I'm guessing the market for these cloned animals is, is to have them in the herd. I expect they cost about as much to raise as a normally produced calf, so there's no reason for any rancher to buy one at, say, ten times the cost of a normal calf just to slaughter it.

Even if they were, I'm not sure I should care. Last I knew, cloning wasn't some sort of Frankenstein process. It's more of an in vitro fertilization type thing, with DNA pushed into some cell that's later implanted in some womb.

The one thing it isn't is Soylent Green, but a lot of people are acting as if it were.