The cloning process is expensive, time consuming and deleterious to the cloned individual, as you have said.  However, those same drawbacks mean that we almost certainly WILL NOT be eating cloned meat.  What is more likely is that we will eat the offspring of cloned animals, which makes breeding easier since you can make as many clones of a good stock as you like.  There may yet be drawbacks to these offspring, but I don't think that any have been shown.

I don't know where the pressure came from [to approve GMO livestock] but it certainly isn't like growing soy beans for sure. Heifer seeding have been done for maybe three decades, called artificial insemination, but that was just for the breeders (bulls and heifers) as opposed to every baby born.  

I don't know about the cattle brain-power over at my old alma-mater, but Texas A&M is a leader on issues of how to genetically screen breeders for (1) maximum calving rates and (2) highest quality meats. Similar things have been done with sheep and interestingly, racing horses.  

No idea what the worry is, since 99.97% of the breeders for any livestock is letting a male and female in a pen for the afternoon. You don't eat the special bulls or heifers until they about drop dead, in which case they make hamburger.  /sam

Onward through the fog

Apparently the New York Times has adopted the approach so often seen in electronic media: constantly trending further and further to right in an attempt to dampen "left wing media" criticism.  Thus we had the unending cheerleading for war in Iraq, the constant drumbeat preparing for an attack on Iran, William "The Bloody Chickenhawk" Kristol on the editorial page and now this clown writing about frankenfood and how there's just darn not enough of it.

I guess it's all part of the Times doing its bit to help people not feel so bad about the end of a 250 year old institution.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Good news!  Downed cows, already too sick to walk, have been approved for school lunches.  Those cloned miscarriaged treats won't have to go into dog food.  They will go into your kid's stomachs at school.

The NYT, just when you think it can't get worse.

Clone this critic to provide a whole new generation of times reporters!  Uniformly mass delusional media empire.  That's worth a little god-play with the genetic ecosystem.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

It is true a bunch of "drops" or downed cattle end up as hamburger. I don't think really sick ones can be processed, and ones dead already for a while are not supposed to be used either. In many cases the poor cow simply has too much weight for its bones, and lays down.

Americans have a funny view about this because they think if livestock are to be eaten (gasp!), they should be happy and frolic among pristine fields, never in old age where they want to lie down. Indeed, laws have been passed to outlaw the practice of rendering horses, many of which were old or severely disabled. So instead of recycling them the horse must be buried in a landfill at great cost. Over in England they're called "knackers."

So I guess more laws to prevent cattle "drops" from being consumed are needed for the gentle-minded, I suppose. Maybe somebody can turn them into ethanol or something, right?
-sam

Onward through the fog

Dear Sam, I read your comments. And information is rather misguided.

Most cows are sick in the livestock production, that is why half of all the antibiotics in this country is used on livestock. - Now if the cows were not sick why would they give them antibiotics?

The cows are not lying down because of old age, in fact a cow outside of the livestock industry lives to be around 23 years old. The cows that are consumed in the factory farming are usually killed by the average age of 5 years old. For male baby cows, it is much sooner, to product veal. So the ideas of old age in the factory farming is not applicable.

I do agree with you, most people do not think about conditions of their animal food. Instead they have a dreamy picture of the animal living a good happy cruelty free life. Which is not the case for over 90% of livestock.

I hope that you do some research, not through the meat lobbyist though. Proper research, and come to a more realistic conclusion.  - I wish you luck in finding real information Sam!

Actually, I hate the Texas Cattle Association or whatever it is and I hate the stockyards as well; I have no need of an education that I can see. It is your prerogative to call most industrial beef "diseased" and I am sure the USDA would be very interested in your facts on the matter.  

Onward through the fog

I know hardly anyone will read this now because it took me three days to get around to replying, but I need to correct this falsehood anyway.

First of all, rendering dead horses isn't illegal, there just isn't much demand for it.  There are a limited number of things you can make from carcasses (that is, not-freshly-slaughtered ones), but in reality most of the things we make from dead animals need to be made of freshly-dead ones.  If I euthanize my horse and have the knacker come the next day and pick up the body, it won't be good for a whole lot, especially if it was euthed chemically rather than with a bullet (though the latter is also a totally humane and fine way to do it if you know how).  Barbiturate-laced tissues aren't very useful.

Second, horse slaughter is currently not going on in this country, it's true.  However, truckloads of horses go to Canada and Mexico every day.  We need better laws to close that loophole (conditions in the Mexican slaughterhouses are horrible beyond conception), but in the meantime we are in a crunch. Between the overbreeding of racehorses for short, all-too-often-useless careers, the overbreeding of other purebred horses because people think they can make money (they can't, and once they figure that out they dump the horses), the overbreeding of useless backyard horses because people are just dumb...and then on top of it all we're in a serious hay shortage right now, thanks to global warming (the drought in the southeast US) and ethanol production stealing our hay fields...so right now there are a LOT of unwanted horses, and therefore a lot of outcry that we need equine slaughter, which is ridiculous.  What we need is to stop breeding so many damn worthless horses that only the killer buyers want.  

None of this has anything to do with rendering euthanized horses.  Most of the horses who go to slaughter are young and able-bodied and just plain not wanted.  As for the ones who are old and decrepit, it's hardly a fitting end for them to travel crammed in on trucks designed for cattle, deprived of food and water for days sometimes during the trip, packed in with larger and more aggressive horses who may hurt the old and lame ones.  There's nothing good about the idea of re-legalizing the operation of horse slaughter plants in the US, except from the point of view of the selfish, greedy owners who feel the need to milk those last few dollars from horses rather than have the decency to take care of them in their retirement.

Oh, absolutely, Canis, the treatment of slaughter-bound animals of all kinds is just awful.  The only shocking thing to me about the story you linked to is how surprised everyone is about it.  People are wilfully ignorant because it's just too hard to stop and give a shit if that means giving up that oh-so-delicious burger.

It is definitely different with horses, though.  For one thing, horses are going through a system of transit and slaughter that's basically designed for cattle, which makes it that much more horrific.  Horses are, on average, taller than cattle, so as cruel as it is to transport any animal in a crowded double-decker (where do you think the urine and excrement from the upper deck goes?), it's much worse when you put a taller, longer-necked animal in that space.  Ditto the actual slaughter mechanisms; they are designed for short, short-necked cattle, and for fairly placid animals.  Horses have long, mobile necks and are easily frightened, so you can imagine how easy it is to stun them or hit them accurately with the captive bolt gun that's supposed to stop brain activity as instantly as a well-placed gunshot.

To me, though, another big difference is that in a lot of cases slaughter-bound horses have already served humans their whole lives and, you'd think, earned retirement.  It baffles me that so many people think horse slaughter is "necessary" just because they are too stupid/cheap/lazy to realize they are breeding an animal that can easily live 30+ years and that in so doing they take responsibility for 30+ years of care.