Is Cloning Animals Ethical?

Animal cloning is when an exact copy of one animal called a donor, is created by transferring its DNA into the empty egg cell of another animal, and then implanting this egg cell into a surrogate where it grows and is finally born. Ethics is the study of what is morally right and wrong, so to rephrase the title of the video, what we’re finding out today is how morally right or wrong animal cloning is. Before we decide whether animal cloning is right or wrong, we need to look at it’s pros and cons to animals first, and then humans. Then, in the conclusion we’ll be able to weigh up the pros and cons of animal cloning for animals and humans and decide whether it is morally right or wrong.


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Animal cloning is a new and experimental practice still in its infancy. Because of this, it offers many potential benefits to animals as long as we keep going with it. For example, animal cloning allows us to create exact copies of certain animals which could help us preserve endangered species like pandas and tigers. It also allows us to recreate animals with desirable traits like guide dogs for the blind and sniffer dogs, as well as animals doing less essential jobs like racehorses. There is also the potential for animal cloning to be used to help restore lost species, like the wooly mammoth and maybe even dinosaurs. Recently, the cloning of dead pets has also started.

Of course, there are downsides to cloning animals on animals. Take this last point about the cloning of dead pets. It arguably objectifies the animals, treating them like a commodity that can be brought back to life as long as somebody's willing to pay. Furthermore, the cloning of pets simply increases the number of strays being euthanised, as families that could have taken them in choose to bring back their dead pets instead. It’s also important to underline the amount of waste that occurs when animals are cloned, for example, before dolly the sheep was the first mammal to be cloned, there were 277 failed attempts and multiple miscarriages, meaning 276 eggs were wasted. Furthermore, dolly, like many cloned animals, lived a shortened life, many have argued because she was cloned from a 6 year old sheep.
Many other clones are also born with physiological disabilities.

Or maybe animal cloning is worth it in the long run because of the benefits it has to humans. For example, The process of cloning animals involves manipulating the DNA of both the donor cell and the egg cell, which helps us learn more about DNA as a whole. This could help us learn how to eradicate diseases such as age related ones, like dementia
and certain cancers. The cloning process also creates stem cells, which are cells that can be used to grow new organs like hearts and spine tissue. Also, the cloned animal can be directly compared against the donor, which allows us to use them for experiments on different drugs that can be used to help humans.

Or maybe animal cloning is not worth it because of the suffering it brings on animals in these experiments. Also, it’s arguably a slippery slope to human cloning, which holds many more moral problems. Who decides who should be cloned? Does the donor have some sort of ownership over the clone? Many argue that human cloning would be an example of us ‘playing God’ deciding who lives and who dies and the number of destroyed eggs associated with cloning underlines this as a significant segment of the population see them as being alive. Human cloning also risks the creation of ‘designer babies’. A designer baby is when fertilised eggs, or embryos have their dna manipulated or selected to remove genes associated with certain diseases and select or insert genes associated with certain traits or characteristics. No more down syndrome, every baby born genetically predisposed to succeed in a certain field, is this what the future holds?

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[mesocorny]

I’m sick of ppl rushing to judgment on this, i say let ‘em do it first for a good while then maybe we can evaluate

[awesomebearaudiobooks]

How ironic that some of the people who most vehemently say that cloning is unethical, are happily eating beef burgers for dinner.

They care about the death of unaware embryos, and yet they don't care about the suffering that cows and chickens have to endure in prison-like facilities.

Not to mention that some of the same people would probably enjoy watching literal animal abuse during a rodeo or a corrida, and yet manipulating cells in a laboratory is somehow "immoral".

[DaftnPunk]

For animal cloning, it needs to be something that’s highly regulated and used for the greater good of humanity rather than general use.

Cloning near extinct animals like Pandas, bringing back recently extinct species like the dodo bird to restore ecosystems, and create if animals to better help humans like guide dogs.

Cloning animals for general pets should not be done however since it doesn’t have a greater good purpose. It doesn’t benefit the whole of humanity.

[aquilesnlmb]

It's not moral but the government still does it

[Johnny]

Why do such useful videos have so few views?

[nahomi]

If animals suffer their whole lives, then im aganist.

[roosh]

For the other guy in the comments, No!