In an initial reaction the commission said the report "gives rise to increased concerns on aspects of animal health and welfare" and left open questions of food safety. Its ethical advisers said earlier this year they saw no convincing arguments to justify the production of cloned meat.
No, that\’s not the way it\’s supposed to work. You can have laws against doing something if there are ethical reasons against such a thing happening: torturing cats to death for example. But we don\’t need to have an ethical justification in favour of something in order to have a law allowing us to do that thing.
There\’s no ethical justfication in favour of sailing a boat: but we don\’t have laws banning us from doing so, do we?
It\’s that old conflict between the styles of the legal system. Do we need the law to lay out what we may do, or do we need the law to merely lay out what we may not do?
The latter is our system and it\’s one of my major complaints with this whole EU thing, that the continental idea of the law as permission to is being imposed.
What these EU nitwits don’t realise is that almost all our fruit (apples, pears, bananas, peaches, pineapples etc) and potatoes are clones. A cloned animal is just the identical twin of another animal. Are our lamb chops specially labelled if they’re from twins? (NO in case you were wondering).
See: Cloned food scare: where’s the beef?
http://badecology.blogspot.com/2008/07/dumb-ecologist-cloned-meat.html