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should be associated with eating cloned horsemeat when there are none associated with eating cloned meat derived from other species. The European Commission has indicated that a ban on cloning food-producing animals is not justified on food safety grounds (Anon 2012a) and there is no evidence that this does not apply to horses as well as ruminants. In the USA, Argentina and Brazil, unlabelled cloned


animals and their products are now allowed in the food chain and can be exported (Anon 2012b). Cloned meat is primarily beef, but no data is available on the consumption of cloned horsemeat. Some consumers feel that it is unethical to clone animals even if eating cloned produce is safe (see below). Cloned meat entering the food chain unlabelled does therefore raise an ethical issue about transparency, relating to consumers’ rights to know what they are eating. This would apply equally to horsemeat or other types of meat being produced by cloning.


Is cloning animals simply morally wrong?


There is undeniably something fundamentally different about cloning compared with all other assisted reproductive techniques (ARTs), since cloning aims to reproduce an existing animal, whereas all other ARTs aim to produce a novel animal. The idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with cloning, that it is somehow beyond the realms of moral acceptability, pervades the literature on cloning in man (Shapiro 1996; Petersen 2002) and is often expressed as ‘an affront to human dignity’. Such concerns are voiced even in institutional documents (Harris 1997) such as the Oviedo Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine (Harris 1997) and the Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics: Human Cloning and Human Dignity (2002). These concerns quite probably do reflect public sentiment, but are poorly defined (Harris 1997; Savulescu 2005; Simpson 2007). Interestingly, there is a similarly poorly defined public


repugnance with the concept of cloning animals, which might be characterised as an ‘affront to the animal’s dignity’. Thus one investigation into public attitudes to animal cloning (Gjerris et al. 2006) found that ‘moral assessment is the most important factor behind the level of support’; that people were concerned about ‘violation of the integrity of animals that cloning might constitute’ and that ‘cloning, seems to cross an invisible border between the natural and the unnatural’. In the 2008 Eurobarometer survey (Anon 2008a,b), 61% of respondents thought that animal cloning was ‘morally wrong’ and 38% said that animal cloning was unethical on moral grounds, whatever the potential benefits in medical or food production terms. Such moral objections to cloning would apply equally to


all food-producing animals, including horses. Yet these moral objections are no better defined for animals than they are for man. Most ARTs violate nature, yet the public seem only really to object to cloning: embryo transfer; artificial insemination and IVF do not inspire a similarly visceral response. Gjerris et al. (2006) suggests that this is because ‘although the concept of naturalness leaves many questions to be answered, it is (undoubtedly) contradicted by the asexual character of reproduction by cloning’. Certainly, although asexual reproduction does occur in nature, asexual


reproduction of farm animals at least (for which the most data on public opinion exists) does not. Whilst public unease about animal cloning based on ill-


defined notions of ‘dignity’ undeniably exists, such unease is not necessarily a strong ethical reason to ban cloning, either of horses or of any other species. ‘..moral gut responses may be morally admirable but they may also be morally wrong’ (Anon 2009b). Whilst the concept of (inviolable) human dignity pervades religion, medicine and law, there is no proof that animals themselves have any concept of ‘dignity’.1 We might consider that there is nothing dignified about an animal kept under an intensive farming system being used for medical research, or being carried in Paris Hilton’s handbag, but an ‘affront to dignity’ seems a weak ethical reason for objecting to any of these practices, all of which can legitimately be objected to for other stronger reasons relating to failure to meet an animal’s welfare needs.


Cloning for conservation


The draft legislation to ban cloning of farm animals proposed by the European Commission in 2013 and amended by the European Parliament in 2015 includes exceptions for the conservation of rare breeds and endangered species. Where animal numbers are small and animals are wild or semi-feral, making the application of invasive ARTs difficult, cloning may provide a method of preserving rare genetic material and promoting biodiversity (Anon 2009c; Yang et al. 2010). Might cloning of horses to preserve rare breeds, for example in the face of an outbreak of fatal exotic disease, such as African horse sickness, be ethically justifiable even if cloning for other, competitive or sentimental purposes was considered unethical? The welfare costs of cloning are discussed in the next


section. These costs to individual animals are independent of the reason(s) for undertaking cloning. Any ethical justification for allowing cloning to facilitate conservation would therefore have to be based in a cost:benefit argument that any costs to individual animals are outweighed by a perceived benefit of preserving the species. Yet is there an absolute benefitin species preservation? Is biodiversity necessarily a good thing? Is the loss of some species (or in the case of horses, breeds) not simply a normal Darwinian mechanism? The consequences of cloning to increase or preserve


biodiversity could themselves have ethical implications; cloning a woolly mammoth, for example, is now feasible, but the consequences in terms of impact on the environment, habitat, other animals and on the welfare of the animal itself (reintroduced to an environment so different from the one which its species last inhabited) are unknown. Whilst it may seem a subjective shame to lose some of the equine rare breeds, the argument that they perform an environmental function which no other breed can do is tenuous. Indeed the environmental function of some rare breeds, such as the Suffolk Punch, has decreased significantly with the mechanisation of agriculture. Even the management of moorlands, to which the rare breed of Exmoor ponies, for example, make a significant contribution, can nowadays be undertaken by other methods. Thus, although governments may face legal obligations under the United Nations


Animals’ needs to express normal behaviours (an interest which should be respected) might be analogous to ‘dignity’


1 ©2016 TheAuthors EquineVeterinary Education publishedbyJohnWiley&Sons Ltdonbehalf of British EquineVeterinary Association


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