This month, Friends of Animals responded to Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council’s request for submissions regarding their “Draft Guidelines for the Creation, Breeding, Care and Use of Genetically Modified and Cloned Animals for Scientific Purposes.” The prepared PDF document is available for download, or you may opt instead to read it online. .
Excerpt:
In this submission we formally respond to the National Health and Medical Research Council’s “Animal Welfare Committee’s Guidelines for the creation, breeding, care and use of genetically modified and cloned animals for scientific purposes, Draft consultation document 2005″ (hereinafter “Draft Guidelines”).
The “integrity” and the “nature” of nonhuman animals may be affected by genetic modification or cloning, observes the Council in the Preamble to the Guidelines. Changes may include how such animals interact with other animals and the environment. The Council states: “Such changes (both expected and unexpected) have major ethical
significance.”
We agree, and believe that Australia should follow that statement to its logical conclusion, and disallow the cloning of nonhuman as well as human beings. We further state that genetic modification of nonhuman beings for human purposes is ethically unacceptable, for the reasons below.