Can anyone explain what a CLONED COW is exactly?

Question

I've been hearing about the FDA possible approving meat & milk from cloned animals such as cow and pigs to be sold in stores in a year or so.
What exactly is cloned meat & milk, how is this process done? I don't really understand how they are doing this cloning.
Why would you want to clone cows & pigs? They are not rare. Why not eat/drink what's natural, why do people have to try to repeat the exact same animal, why not just let it give birth instead of cloning it?
To me eating & drinking cloned meat & milk sounds crazy - it seems morally wrong, unsafe, unnatural, & just plain ridiculous. What's the point?

Answer 1

This is gonna be a long one, even for me. I'm sorry for the novel.

A cloned animal is created when scientists transfer genetic material from the nucleus of a donor adult cell to an egg whose nucleus, and thus its genetic material, has been removed. The reconstructed egg containing the DNA from a donor cell must be treated with chemicals or electric current in order to stimulate cell division. Once the cloned embryo reaches a suitable stage, it is transferred to the uterus of a female host where it continues to develop until birth. A clone is not a TRUE replica of the donor animal. Only the clone's chromosomal or nuclear DNA is the same as the donor. Some of the clone's genetic materials come from the mitochondria of the egg used. I raise goats and there have been a number of them cloned (not mine, at 10K a pop it's way out of my range!) and they don't look like their donor.

It is also NOT an easy or inexpensive process. With goats, you may produce 100 cloned embryos and only 1 or 2 survive to birth.

Given the expense of the process it is HIGHLY unlikely you'll be eating a cloned animal. The only point of approving the consumption is so that when the animal ages, it will be legal to sell it for slaughter. Don't expect cattle producers to be cloning cattle for eating alone, they barely make money now with regularly produced ones!

The purpose of cloneing an animal for milk makes a little more sense. If you are a dairy farmer and all of your cows are producing 8-15 gallons of milk a day (normal) and you have one young cow who is putting down 50 gallons a day, you'd want a whole herd just like her, right? Well breeding more just isn't feasable. She can only have a single calf a year and you've got a 50/50 chance it'll be a bull calf. Even if it's a heifer, it may not even come close to what her dam was capable of. To buy another top producer like your girl might cost you $10,000, and that's assuming you could find one. Enter cloning. If you're lucky, you can clone her for about the same cost and have several of her in your herd within a few years, rather than breeding for 20 years trying to nail down her traits.

Here's the long range vision though. Imagine if you have a dairy and you need 300 cows to produce the amount of milk you need to make a living. With cloning, you are looking at a future where perhaps only 100 cows can produce the same amount of milk. Less impact on the environment, lower cost to produce the same product. THAT is why people are pushing to have cloned animals become acceptable. It's already being done with the top individuals of their breeds in cattle, hogs, sheep and goats.

Is it safe? Yes, there's no mysterious cell manipulation going on here (unlike Monsanto who'd cross just about anything into a plant and ask you to eat it). Is it immoral? That's a personal call.

Answer 2

A cloned cow is just a cow that was not produced through natural reproduction process, e.g. no sperm and egg joining to make a zygote. What is done is that DNA from another cow is taken and inserted into a fertilized egg replacing the pre-existing DNA there. So the cloned cow's DNA is exactly the same as its "parent", and it has no mama cow nor papa cow. Its sex of course would be the same as its parent.

The FDA has found no difference between meat from cloned cows and meat from regular cows. This is why they are considering approving it for consumption. Of course, they are still a ways away from that approval as ethical reasons may also come into play.

I don't know why one would want to clone cows or pigs for consumption. It seems to be a costlier process than the normal breeding process. Mind you, I am not a rancher so I wouldn't know the costs or the process that they do nowadays. Perhaps some companies do in vitro fertilization now to minimize damage to cows. And if they are, perhaps, cloning would be a guarantee that the animals they have will not have any genetic disease.

Answer 3

I'm not knowledgeable, but here's my guess... A guess from someone from the general public who is absolutely NOT a scientist... Haha. I'm a fifteen year old girl looking ahead to the future...

I think a clowned cow is a cow that has the exact same DNA as another cow... And the cell is put into a female cow's womb to be born... I don't know. But yeah.

Cloned meat is meat from a cloned cow. The cloned cow is killed. And the milk from a female cloned cow is extracted....

The process is done by all this scientific stuff, man. With labaratories, test tubes, microscopes, and what not.

I like the idea of cloning...

Sure, cloning may seem unhelpful now, but what if we extracted the DNA of every species-- even ones that are prone to extinction. And if such a calamity was about to happen, for example animals that need mates but they are extinct... we can help them out.

The positive possibilities are endless.

I also was watching a long time ago the Ice Age 2 DVD bonus features... LOL. And there was this little fun doctumentary talking about animals.... They were talking about the fact that they found some well preserved mammoths in some northern snowy area and the tissue is well enough to extract DNA in it... Sure. It may seem impossible to clone a mammoth because of their extinction... But who knows what one day happen.

This cloning thing might go a long, long way. Just like sci-fi movies...

Science is meant to advance... The cloning technology will advance. With cloning things like cells or DNA, maybe it can help with diseases, populations of organisms, and ultimately advance humanity into a whole another level.

Answer 4

Here's some advice: please don't draw any conclusions before you know all the facts (or in this case none). How can anyone form an opinion without knowing any information? Just a thought...
By definition cloning is: a genetically identical copy of the cell or in this case a cow. First, The process is long and complicated and the success rate is quite low. To clone Dolly, 227 attempts were made, of those attempts only 29 lived longer than 6 days and only one Dolly was born. The cloning process usually begins with the removal of the nucleus from a fertilized egg and replacement with another nucleus (like an adult cow). If the process is successful, then the desirable characteristics can be obtained with a high degree of certainty. In addition, cloning mosquitoes has led a team of medical researchers from the University of California to develop an antibody that prevents the malaria parasite from entering the mosquito's salivary gland, so when it bites it won't infect the host aka humans or your beloved pet. Moreover, cloning has vastly improved how diabetics cope with insulin shortages by mass producing human insulin in bacteria called Humulin. In short, cloning would be useful is diagnosing human genetic disorders, studying gene structure, gene sequence and gene expression, creating pest resistance plants and so much more. The greatest sin against mankind is to believe something without proof.

I hope this helps!

Answer 5

Cloned livestock is when the genetic material of a certain animal, in this case a cow or pig, is taken and inserted into an ovum. (Note that this is NOT a case of genetically engineered livestock. That would require actually modifications to the genetic material) To do this, the donor egg/ovum is stripped of its original genetic material so that the cell exists without any DNA. The donor DNA is then inserted into the bare egg cell and then given a microscopic electrical shock to stimulate cell growth and division. This cell mass is then implanted into a surrogate mother and hopefully taken to term by the animal and birthed normally, not in some vat. Success rates in general are extremely low. The reasons for cloning animals are not for supply reasons but actually for breeding reasons. Animals that show favorable traits, like producing more milk than others for example, can be cloned and bred so that their traits are passed on on a wider scale. The reasons for the FDA approval is because there had been concern that cloned animals and their products would inevitably wind up on the market and might be unsafe to consume, which is not the case since they are simply identical twins of their donor. Cloned animals, though conceived differently, are just as natural as other animals.

Answer 6

A clone is an exact copy of the original since it uses the same genetic material. The technology doesn't yet exist to do mass cloning so cloned meat will NOT be in the stores anytime soon. As far as eating cloned meat goes why would it be crazy? Do you personally go to the stock yard and pick the cow you want to eat? Can you tell the difference between a non-cloned cow and a cloned one? No because they are duplicates of each other.

Answer 7

What you call a soul I call a innovations. we are able to make brains. we've cloned many animals and there grow to be a rumor a whilst in the past a pair of cloned toddler nonetheless i do no longer think of that's actual. i truly have not have been given any subject with cloning. Clones is in simple terms no longer the acceptable comparable simply by fact the guy the DNA grow to be from a clone would be its very own guy or woman.

Answer 8

This is a really complicated subject so I will try to explain....

From my understanding, biologists take an devoliping gamete (sex cell) and then insert a nucleaus with certian genetic coding... A lot of times it is supposed to add more protien to the milk to make it healthier. They are trying to make human milkk come out of a cow or something crazy like that.

I think the point just to prove it can be done! I am not sure if anyone actually is dying to have some genetically altered pig and cow products... hope that helps!

Answer 9

well a cloned cow is a exact clone of another cow . then they kill it like they would any other animal and eat it. they are just announcing that there is nothing unsafe about eating the flesh of a cloned animal, that it is just the same as eating the natural one. they clone them because it is easier to ensure them being healthy and big without being pumped full of chemicals. i hope it helps

Answer 10

curiosity would ruin us soon