Animal Protection Groups Condemn FDA's Endorsement of Anim...( Animal Groups Say Greenlighting P...)

Animal Groups Say Greenlighting Production of Cloned Animals for Food is Irresponsible and Unethical; Research Finds Cloning Detrimental to Animals' Well-being

WASHINGTON, Jan. 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Farm Sanctuary, the nation's leading farm animal protection organization, in association with the American Anti-Vivisection Society (AAVS), the oldest organization in the nation dedicated to ending experiments on animals, denounce the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) decision today to endorse the sale of cloned animals and their offspring for food. The agency moved forward with the announcement despite massive opposition from many corners, including Congress, the dairy industry, and animal protection and consumer advocacy groups. The FDA also called on producers to respect the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) request for a voluntary moratorium on the sale of cloned animals, though this moratorium would not apply to the progeny of cloned animals. Farm Sanctuary and AAVS are calling for a mandatory moratorium on cloned animals and their offspring to be established immediately.

The FDA's final risk assessment on animal cloning is filled with the same twists of logic, assumptions, and misrepresentations as the draft released in December 2006, despite thousands of comments criticizing the agency's analysis. For example, though the FDA acknowledges its responsibility to consider "the health of animals involved in the cloning process," the agency goes on to say that "our goal in evaluating the data on animal health... was not to determine whether the animals involved in the cloning process experienced adverse outcomes, but rather whether any of these outcomes are unique to cloning."

Simply tallying what problems cloned animals experience, without assessing the frequency or severity of those problems, hardly constitutes a rigorous science-based decision the FDA claims to have made. By the FDA's logic, something that causes sev
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