ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a range of wider concerns about farm animal cloning. The cloning of Dolly the sheep, more than ten years ago, was widely seen as a major achievement of the scientific community, and many potential beneficiaries of cloning, within both human biomedicine and food production, quickly came to entertain great hopes so far as applications of the technology were concerned. At the same time, however, concerns were raised about ethical implications. As the technology has been refined, more species have been cloned, and applications have begun to emerge, albeit at a much slower pace than originally expected. Farm animal cloning has run into several technical/biological problems that were not anticipated in the early days of development, such as low efficiency, a high incidence of malformations and reduced viability of the animals. Animal cloning in farm animal production is viewed by large sectors of the European public as highly problematic.
