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Cloning Your Bacon?Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) Compassion in World Farming, the UK's leading farm animal welfare group, today condemned as "scandalous" the new wave of cloning experiments on farm animals. As new batches of cloned pigs are reported both by British and Japanese groups, CIWF declared that both human and animal welfare concerns had been ignored. Some of the cloning experiments are designed to rapidly multiply genetically engineered pigs to produce organs more suitable for transplant into humans. The latest Japanese pig clones are intended to "optimise meat production". Joyce D'Silva, CIWF's Director, said "I honestly can't believe that the average consumer will want to be eating meat from cloned, probably genetically engineered, pigs or other animals. As for the development of genetically engineered pigs to produce organs for humans, not only will the pigs suffer a range of surgical operations and lives of isolated misery until their organs are extracted, but those very organs may transfer viruses into recipients and these could be transferred on to patients' families and the rest of us. There is increasing evidence that pig viruses can be transferred to human cells and some of these could cause a deadly infectious disease in the whole human population. Scientists admit that all cloning experiments involve huge losses of animals. For example, 11 of the 14 cloned lambs, announced by the same British company in June, died - many from kidney, liver or brain abnormalities. Compassion in World Farming calls on the UK government to scrap the xenotransplant work going on in the UK at the moment. It knows very well that not only are pigs suffering but that many primates, who have been used as dummy humans in experiments, have suffered incredibly after being given pig organs and have died from organ rejection or from being poisoned by the massive amounts of drugs they have been given to suppress their immune systems, or from infections. This huge mountain of animal suffering, and the real risks to all of us in the future, surely should be sufficient reason for the government to say enough is enough."
ROSS MINETT |