Public auction of clone offspring cancelled 06 March 08


http://tinyurl.com/yqmo4a
Famous dairy cows, Dundee Paradise and Dundee Paratrooper, were due to
be sold at public auction on 5 March; however, following pressure from
animal welfare groups including Compassion in World Farming and
several newspapers (particularly The Daily Mail), the clone progeny
(offspring) were withdrawn from the auction.

The Daily Mail approached Compassion in World Farming Ambassador,
Joyce D'Silva, for her comments and Peter Stevenson, our Chief Policy
Advisor, featured on BBC Radio 4's Farming Today explaining Compassion
in World Farming's strong case against the cloning of farm animals.

Peter Stevenson said, "The sale of the offspring of a cloned cow will
bring cloning out of the laboratory and on to the farm. Before long,
we will see meat and milk from the offspring of cloned animals on the
supermarket shelf."

The frozen embryo of Dundee Paradise was flown to the UK in 2006 to be
reared on a Midlands farm. She was the daughter of a clone, developed
from cells taken from a champion dairy Holstein.

Cloning leads to a high level of animal suffering and health problems.
Once a cloned embryo has been produced, it has to be implanted into a
surrogate mother – this is a stressful and invasive procedure.
Moreover, cloned foetuses are often larger than normal; this leads to
difficult births and often to caesarean deliveries. Many clones die
during pregnancy. Of those that survive, many die in the early weeks
of life from heart and liver failure, kidney abnormalities and
respiratory problems.

The law on animal cloning for food

The situation is still quite a grey area. As it stands, there are a
number of hoops that suppliers and retailers would have to jump
through before they could put products on the market.

This is because food products derived from clones or their offspring
are subject to the EC Novel Food Regulation – which basically means
that they would require a full pre-market safety assessment before
sale and potentially be branded with a food label indicating their
derivation. There has been no such application to date, but recent
events considered, it certainly looks as though an application is
getting closer to reality.

Peter Stevenson continues, "We are calling on consumers to make it
clear to the supermarkets that they don’t want meat or milk from
cloned animals or their offspring. We urge the government to ban the
cloning of animals. We're working with MEPs to get a ban on the sale
of meat or milk from cloned animals and their offspring."

Cloning of farm animals is taking us in the wrong direction - towards
perpetuating industrial farming when all other societal trends point
towards sustainable farming and respect for animals as sentient
beings.

Compassion in World Farming is recognised as the leading international
farm animal welfare organisation actively campaigning to improve the
lives of farmed animals all around the world. We celebrated our 40th
anniversary with a Photo Exhibition and Competition (ends June 08).

( _ /) wrote:
> Public auction of clone offspring cancelled 06 March 08
>
>
> http://tinyurl.com/yqmo4a
> Famous dairy cows, Dundee Paradise and Dundee Paratrooper, were due to
> be sold at public auction on 5 March; however, following pressure from
> animal welfare groups including Compassion in World Farming and
> several newspapers (particularly The Daily Mail), the clone progeny
> (offspring) were withdrawn from the auction.

Nothing but scare-mongering.