Cloning Ethics

If you have been reading news stories about pet cloning and thinking you would like to clone your pet, you may want to take a closer look at the ethics of cloning. It results in many deaths of dogs and cats, and the animals involved may be mistreated. The companies involved in cloning animals have questionable motives, and their marketing tactics lead the public to have unrealistic expectations for pet cloning. The strongest evidence in the case against animal cloning is that it is unregulated. If pet cloning companies have no obligation to report to an authority, there is no accounting for their practices.

Companies that clone your pet report minimal information on their research and findings. What is known is that hundreds of dogs and cats are involved in these procedures, and very few successes are reported. Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology was interviewed for a blog published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said,

Anyone who wants to have their pet cloned should ask themselves if they are willing to have one or two defective copies of "Fluffy" or "Spot" put down in order to get their pet back. Of course, cloning is associated with lots of abnormalities and genetic defects--and a significant percent of newborn animals die in the first few days or weeks of life.

The "clone your pet" companies that profit from these practices do not publicize the inhumane aspects of the industry, and these findings bring up several other questions. What happens to the hundreds of animals used by these companies once research and procedures have ceased? How are they treated during the proceedings? If so many clones die soon after birth, what health problems will survivors face later in life?

David Magnus of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University calls pet cloning “morally problematic.” Cloning companies intentionally mislead potential customers. Lanza goes on to describe an experiment in which a herd of sheep was created from a single genetic material donor. The herd created a social structure, and each sheep had a distinct personality. The unethical practices of animal cloning companies are abundantly clear; they use unregulated and unreported cloning processes to produce animals that do not meet expectations they have set for customers.