EXTRACT: "The news that this has arrived without any checks and without any controls from the Government, despite the fact that they were advised by the Government advisory committee to introduce controls, will undermine trust in British farming and British food. It is irresponsible and bad for the industry. There should be a moratorium on any use of any cloned animals or the offspring of any cloned animals." - Peter Melchett
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Trust in British food "threatened by birth of calf"
By Nicole Martin, and Nick Britten
The Telegraph, 11 January 2006 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/11/nembryo11.xml

The Government was accused yesterday of "inexcusable and irresponsible" behaviour after it emerged that the calf of an American cloned cow had been born on a British farm.

Animal welfare campaigners said the birth last month of Dundee Paradise at a Shropshire farm without the Government's knowledge would undermine trust in British farming.

It would also undermine trust in British food because it raised the possibility of the calf's milk entering the human food chain, they claimed. Cloned animals and their offspring have not been used before in British commercial farming.

But supporters of cloning said a five-year study by the US Food and Drug Administration had concluded last month that "meat and milk from clones and their offspring are as safe as food we eat every day".

Dundee Paradise is the daughter of a clone, Vandyk K Integ Paradise 2, created in the US by the company Cyagra Clone using cells from a champion dairy Holstein, Vandyk K Integ Paradise.

"Vandyk-K Integrity Paradise, the two time Supreme Champion at the World Dairy Expo, was an easy choice for her owners to clone," said the company. "When you have an individual this good you need to have more copies of her to realise her true value."

The procedure, which cost about £9,800, involved removing eggs from the clone, fertilising them in a laboratory and implanting them into a surrogate cow.

The British farm bought five embryos from America to be implanted into its Holsteins. The others are expected to be born in the next few weeks.

Mark Rueth, 45, a farmer in Oxford, Wisconsin, who owns the clone cow and sold the embryos, said yesterday that the procedure made sense "because it increases the genetic base of an elite cow".

Those in favour of cloning say that an animal clone is a genetic copy. It is not the same as genetic engineering, which involves altering, adding or deleting DNA. Supporters believe that the technology is fundamental to the success of the farming industry, enabling farmers to replicate elite livestock.

Dr Barbara Glenn, the managing director of the department of animal biotechnology at Bio, the trade association for the biotechnology industry in America, said cloning could help farmers to develop animals resistant to pandemic diseases such as foot and mouth.

"We are talking about assisted reproductive technology," she said. "It allows farmers to produce more reliable, healthier animals capable of producing more nutritious meat and milk."

The Government rejected advice by the Farm Animal Welfare Council in 2004 to set up a committee to monitor attempts to introduce cloning to the commercial farming industry.

Lord Melchett, the policy director of the Soil Association, said the Government's failure to impose regulatory controls on such a practice was "inexcusable".

"The news that this has arrived without any checks and without any controls from the Government, despite the fact that they were advised by the Government advisory committee to introduce controls, will undermine trust in British farming and British food," he said.

"It is irresponsible and bad for the industry. There should be a moratorium on any use of any cloned animals or the offspring of any cloned animals. I have seen absolutely no evidence that consumers want this and lots of evidence which suggests that consumers are very uneasy about the idea of eating meat from cloned animals or drinking milk from clone animals."

Since the days of pioneering British clones such as the sheep Dolly, Megan and Morag, cloners have noted low pregnancy rates and a condition called large offspring syndrome.

Peter Stevenson, the chief policy adviser at Compassion for World Farming, said he was "horrified" by the news that the offspring of a cloned animal was born in Britain.

"Cloning is an incredibly invasive surgical procedure that causes health and welfare problems for all the animals involved," he said. "It is doubly worrying that there is no safeguard in place to avoid serious animal welfare and ethical problems from the introduction of this Frankenstein technology." Andrew Praill, the honorary secretary of the British Cattle Veterinary Association, said: "Our worries are whether the right safeguards are in place to ensure that there are no problems as a result of a trade in cloned embryos, such as genetic traits from chromosomal changes."

A spokesman for the Department for Food and Rural Affairs said the Government did not believe that any animal health and welfare regulations had been contravened.

"From an animal health point of view there are no specific EU regulations that govern the import of cloned animals or embryos other than those health and welfare conditions that must be met for all embryos or animals." he said.

"EU animal health rules do not require us to differentiate cloned from normal embryos and we do not see the need to 'gold plate' this issue."

The company that owns the calf refused to comment last night.