Cloning Cattle?

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DawnInTexas

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Are practicing Catholics allowed to clone their livestock?

+Peace Be With You.
-Dawn
 
I don’t see why not. The Church doesn’t say anything about the breeding of livestock as far as I know. The only prohibitions are on human cloning as a protection of the dignity of human life. This would be my understanding of the matter at least.
 
The bible tells us that God gave Adam dominion over the animals. The Church therefore allows to use animals as we need them. Their lives are not sacred in way that human life is sacred, because human life is created in the image of God, and animal life is not. Therefore, we can kill animals for our needs or pleasure, or even clone them. We cannot kill or clone humans because human life is sacred.
 
It is not necessary to treat animals the way we treat humans. If it were otherwise, we would have to consider farm animals slaves nor could we eat animals.
 
I have a serious disagreement with the other posters. Cloning is never, never okay. It is an abomination of God’s plan. We were give dominion over animals, but that does not mean we abuse a gift that God has given us.
 
Well, Turtle, how do you feel about hybridization? Its the next door field of science to cloning. And now you can hardly buy an item of produce that’s not the result of that technology. When hybridization began being used in agriculture, the same argument was used. They were “playing God”. It wasn’t true then, and its not true now.
 
Look as I might, I cannot find a difinitive answer. It seems the Church believes in the danger that animal cloning might or WOULD lead to cloning humans, which is unacceptable:

vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdlife/documents/rc_pa_acdlife_doc_30091997_clon_en.html

Is this how you read this?

Okay…So we need the Church to define through Magisterial Teaching, what is the truth. We do.

Shall I ask the same question (here) in “Ask an Apologist?”

I will, and when I receive an answer, I will post the link here for discussion, as those are answered, then locked.

+Peace Be With You.
 
turtle18 said:
I have a serious disagreement with the other posters. Cloning is never, never okay. It is an abomination of God’s plan.
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Cloning is not an abomination of God’s plan any more than any other form of selective breeding in farm animals, dogs, or pets is. Personally, as a farmer myself who makes heavy use of artificial insemination in addition to natural matings, I would say from a genetic progress standpoint, cloning is a dead end. An animal which is not an improvement over its dam (which is what a clone is) is lost time. In my field, my animals have to be constantly improving over successive generations and cloning does not afford that progress. It is of much more value to select proven herd sires from nationally ranked sire summaries and use them heavily through artificial insemination.
Rejecting the cloning of animals as an intrinsic evil however, is not a teaching of the Catholic Church.
 
DawnInTexas said:
Are practicing Catholics allowed to clone their livestock?
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Yes, however it is not presently very economical. Just having an embryo transfer done performed as a result of a purely natural breeding is currently very expensive, although in many cases, depending on the genetic makeup of the progeny involved, it can certainly be worth the expense. Many inferior animals can carry the progeny of animals of higher quality by serving as an incubator during gestation.
The cloning procedure adds another large expense on top of the already expensive embryo transfer procedure. The result is a high proliferation of a concentrated genetic makeup in a small selective group. This is not desirable from a herd improvement standpoint. Selective line breeding allows much more rapid results.
 
turtle18 said:
I have a serious disagreement with the other posters. Cloning is never, never okay. It is an abomination of God’s plan. We were give dominion over animals, but that does not mean we abuse a gift that God has given us.
Click to expand...
does your self defined prohibition extend to artificial insemenation of cattle, interbreeding and hyrbridizing, and eating animals for food?
 
My apologies for the thread resurrection, however, I was searching for a Catholic Answer for a matter which has recently become important to me and my family and I came upon this old thread.

My question more pertains to artificially inseminating cows as I have just heeded my call to move back to the land, as it were. I am in the process of budgeting for a Dexter cow which I will use for milk production for my family. I am also considering a future project that includes either mating her with a bull or having her artificially inseminated. This latter option gives me the creeps, to be honest with you, as it seems yet another technological means to an end. So, as Chesterton would no doubt approve, I am asking should this particular route be taken even though we could take it. As with the cloning of animals, may we as Catholics in good conscience and in good faith, execute upon such a process as artificial insemination of livestock. Yes, it can be done but should we be doing it? Thanks for your time and thoughts on the matter.
 
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