08. I CLONED MY COW, I CLONED MY COW
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We continue our exploration of cloning with a closer look at how cloning and factory farming interact. Is animal cloning humane? Is it a technologically advanced key to the problems of factory farming? Or does it simply perpetuate the already existing issues?
Peter Stevenson is Chief Policy Advisor for Compassion in World Farming, as well as a qualified solicitor. He has worked in the animal welfare sector for over three decades and played a leading role in winning EU bans on certain cages and crates in farming as well as passing EU legislation that recognizes animals as sentient beings.
Dorrit Moussaieff is an Israeli jewelry designer, editor, and businesswoman. She was the First Lady of Iceland from 2003 to 2016.
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John Holten: Hello Eva.
Eva Kelley: Hey John.
JH: Let’s pick up where we left off in the last episode. We were looking at cloning. Last time, the episode was called “I cloned my dog. I cloned my dog”.
EK: Which never gets old!
JH: And we ended up looking at how cloning doesn’t have much to do with humans per say yet,
EK: Yet.
JH: Yet, at least. But it does have to do with animals at this point in time, in a very real and active way. And that’s not just people who clone their pets, who can afford to clone their pets, but it’s used in farming. And so you mentioned that this is now really an animal rights issue, right?
EK: Yeah, more than anything else. So we’re going to look at that more closely. Welcome to episode 8: I cloned my cow. I cloned my cow.
JH: Aha!
[Intro: The Life Cycle, a podcast about the future of humanity]
EK: So, I reached out to the non-profit organization “compassion in world farming,” which was actually set up 50 years ago by a British farmer who was becoming increasingly concerned with how intense animal farming was becoming. Interestingly, just as a side note, they are not vegan or vegetarian, but they advocate instead that animals should be reared and ultimately slaughtered according to high welfare standards. So anyway, they referred me to one of their chief policy advisors, Peter Stevenson. Stevenson is a lawyer and he has worked in the animal welfare sector for over three decades and played a leading role in winning EU bans on certain cages and crates in farming as well as passing an EU legislation that recognizes animals as sentient beings. So, I asked Stevenson what he thought about cloning, and how it affected animals. He started off by walking me through the scientific process of it and then revealed some more shocking facts about the birthing process. Of course, in his examples, he focuses on animals being cloned in agriculture, not pets.
Peter Stevenson: So it's, it's implanted into what's called a surrogate mother. And she will carry that embryo as it gradually develops over the weeks and becomes a cloned fetus and then eventually, that clone fetus is born. Now, this process of transferring, of implanting this very tiny cloned embryo into the surrogate mother is actually very, very stressful with with pigs and sheep it’s going to involve a surgical procedure.
PS: With cattle, it's what's called embryo transfer, and that's sufficiently stressful that said in the UK, the law requires it be done with an anaesthetic you know as a general or epidural. But that's when the biggest problems they start happening because a very large number of cloned embryos, died during pregnancy they fail to survive.
PS: Once they become fetuses, many of these cloned fetuses die at or shortly after birth there's a very low success rate. For those that survive and are born alive, many die in the early weeks of life from cardiovascular failure, respiratory difficulties, kidney problems, defective immune systems, muscular skeletal abnormalities, and one study that looked at all this brought all this together said, of those born alive, 22% of cloned calves 25% of cloned piglets. 50% of cloned lambs die before they even get weaned. So, you know, a huge catalogue of mortality and painful problems for the clones and for the mothers. For example, a key problem with cloned calves is what they call large offspring syndrome.
PS: Cloned calves are often much larger than a normal calf this can lead to very difficult painful births, the use of caesarean sections to deliver them is much greater than normal. And in all these problems was summed up by the European Food Safety Authority, which said that the health and welfare of a significant proportion of clones is adversely affected, often severely and with a fatal outcome.
EK: I asked Stevenson if he could give me some more specific figures, you know hard data, on the use of cloning in farming.
PS: t's really hard. And I looked again over the weekend, to make sure was there wasn’t some fresh information that I wasn't aware of, and it's really hard to get clear, specific figures. There was a huge battle in the European Union. Eight, nine years ago about this, and the European Parliament was absolutely clear that there shouldn't be any cloning in the EU, there shouldn't be any use of cloned animals or on their offspring on EU farms. And that was a battle that raged for about three years. But eventually, the whole thing of it died down.
PS: It was decided that meat and milk from clones, or more likely their offspring would be dealt with under what's called the novel foods regulation, which is how any new kind of food has to be approved before being sold, to make sure it is safe for consumers. But it doesn't look at the animal welfare aspects.
PS: There's really no information. I doubt if clothing is going on in Europe, but to what extent we're getting imported offspring of clones certainly again, going back seven or eight years. There were a few cases reported in the media of the offspring of clones coming into UK farms. You see, there's no requirement for the food and this meat and milk to be available. So consumers don't know.
EK: Why are there no figures?
PS: Well, that itself is something of a scandal. It’s even hard to know which countries it's actually going on in. Looking at information recently, it seems there's a certain amount of cloning going on in the US and Canada, in Argentina, in Australia, probably in Brazil, if only because there's the presence of companies that do cloning.
PS: But it's really hard. And as I say, consumers aren't. It's not labelled. There's a current scandal going on in the UK, where the UK government is pushing through legislation very quickly to permit the, I mean gene editing of animals as already permitted on the experimental basis, but to permit gene edited animals and their offspring to be used in UK farms for their meat and milk to be sold in UK shops.
And the government's insistence it won't be labelled. So consumers who are opposed to this on on ethical animal welfare grounds, won't be able to play a part and say, No, we don't want this. This has been foisted on consumers.
PS: And it's been foisted on consumers because this is part of this is part of the the high tech factory farming world that is forever looking for new technologies to push breading further to get animals to grow faster, to be more productive. And then I gave an example, a couple of examples of selective breeding.
EK: So this is essentially the point right, is to produce animals for consumption in the most efficient way. Selective breeding has been done, I mean, probably, since the beginning of farming. Breeding the strongest healthiest animals with each other to produce the best possible offspring, is kind of sensical right? But then Stevenson mentions CRISPR and how CRISPR and cloning kind of go hand in hand these days in farming, because you use CRISPR to optimize the animal and then you clone that optimized animal. Voila. It’s kind of like selective breeding on steroids.
PS: CRISPR Cas9 is the kind of method there are others. But it's the one most commonly used. Now cloning is an important part of this process. Because once you've got your gene edited animal, if you want to scale this up to have enough animals for a commercial enterprise, you're going to clone them.
PS: So despite the lack of the low success rate, cloning hasn't just disappeared. It's still there. But there are other reasons, from an animal welfare point of view to object this beyond just the huge problems in the process itself and the large number of animals that suffer and die. The main reason for cloning farm animals and the need for gene editing. There's two main reasons Firstly, to get animals to grow faster, and have high yields and also for disease resistance, but just traditional selective breeding over the last 30 years, to get animals for to grow, to drive animals to faster growth and higher yields, has caused immense problems.
PS: For example, chickens reared for meat “broilers” have been selectively bred to grow very, very quickly, and their legs, heart and circulatory system can't properly support that rapidly growing body. As a result, each year globally, billions of chickens are suffering from painful leg disorders, while others succumb to heart problems.
PS: Another example can be seen with cows, you know, naturally a cow would produce just over 1000 litres for her calf and in a 10 month lactation. But modern dairy cows have been genetically selectively bred to produce 10, even 12,000 litres of milk a year. This puts a huge strain on their bodies, many of them are suffering.
PS: It's not the only reason for this, but it's a big contributor. There's these very high yields from painful lameness and mastitis, which is an udder infection, as well as suffering from reproductive and metabolic disorders. So selective breeding has been a disaster for farm animals, we've now got cloning and gene editing points to make this worse. The other big thing that the scientific community will tend to say is, well, we can clone animals to make them disease, you know, you take an animal, which is disease resistant, and you make lots of copies of disease resistant herd.
PS: If you look at disease resistance, or cloning or gene editing for disease resistant sounds good. And indeed, if you're talking about diseases that has have nothing to do with how animals are being kept, it may well be beneficial. But an awful lot of diseases and farmed animals are coming from them being kept in recurrent, crowded, stressful conditions, the kinds of conditions which lead to the to the emergence, spread, and even amplification of pathogens.
PS: Now, the proper way to deal with this is to keep animals in good conditions in what I call health oriented systems. systems in which good health is inherent in the farming methods, rather than being propped up by cloning or gene editing for disease resistance. And the big problem you're going to have here is that if you make animals resistant through cloning, to the diseases of factory farming, it can perpetuate factory farming.
PS: Indeed, it could allow animals to be kept in even worse conditions now, because they will be resistant to the diseases that are inevitable when animals are kept in very poor stressful conditions. So the the other problem with disease resistance, of course, is if you've got, you know, a cloned herd, they're all by definition, genetically identical. And so if a disease gets into that farm, it's going to spread like wildfire. There's none of the genetic diversity, which can create natural disease resistance,
EK: I then wondered if those clones are breeding with each other.
PS: Yeah, that's a good point. Clones are very high value breeding animals that they're going to be kept on farms, not for their meat and milk. But as high value breeding animals, you could either breed two clones, or you could breed a clone and an ordinary animal. But what you then once you bred the clones, what you've got is ordinary animals, so we refer to them as the offspring of clones they're not themselves clones. `but they too, will all be genetically identical or almost genetically identical, and therefore all equally vulnerable to a disease that gets onto the farm. And so yes, the the meat and milk from clones of gene editing animals that comes into shops, and it's very hard to know how much is already there probably probably not a lot but some. that's not going to come from the clothes themselves, but from the offspring of clones.
JH: Wow, so okay, what’s the takeaway? In what sense are clones part of our diets?
EK: Well, it’s kind of murky territory as Stevenson said. It’s like we’re still in the Wild West period of cloning and gene editing. It’s like the early days of well, anything really, where there’s just not enough data or knowledge to set up clear laws.
JH: Or something horribly wrong hasen’t happened yet?
EK: Basically, yeah. So Stevenson did say that it’s very unlikely that cloned animals are being produced for meat consumption in Europe, but that in other countries it may actually already be quite common and there’s just a lack of regulation behind it so nobody really knows. And by nobody, I mean, the consumer right? But, this is speculation of course, we don’t want to create a conspiracy theory here.
JH: Okay, so in farming, cloning has had a negative impact on the animals. But did you ask Stevenson what he thinks about this whole service industry of cloning pets?
EK: I did.
PS: Okay, so now I'm not talking about on behalf of Compassion in World Farming, because it's a farm animal organisation. So this is just my personal view. As you know, from the barking episode, earlier, I've got two dogs. I've had a number of dogs over my life, it's immensely upsetting, painful when, when your dog dies at the end of its life. But I don't think it’s to then clone a copy of it. It's immensely upsetting, but new dogs, very different, probably from the dog that you've lost, somehow arrive in your life. And I think to clone, a pet dog, is a denial of the nature of life. I mean, very, very sadly, all of us die eventually.
PS: And I think one just has to have a painful except that. I think, I think the gross interference, and I’m talking more broadly than just about pets, that gross interference with with nature, the lack of respect for the natural world is behind a fair number of the problems that we're now experiencing, you know, problems like climate change, loss of biodiversity, an immense kind of amount of pollution of water through factory farming. So no, I don't think one should be cloning ones pets.
EK: I really appreciated this perspective, because he wasn’t saying that cloning is freaky or morally wrong, he wasn’t criticizing the ethics of it, he was saying that death, as sad as it is, is a part of life and that it’s sort of tragically, coming to terms with that, is a big part of what it means to be human.
JH: Yeah I guess so. But then, at the same time, grief so subjective, it’s a personal thing, and its hard to tell someone how they should or shouldn’t try and get over it. And for someone like Dorrit Moussaiieff, if you remember the phone call from the beginning of this episode, she knows that her cloned dog Samson is a different dog, it’s not the exact same as the original dog, Samur. So cloning Samur for her was a way to grieve and honor the memory of, should I say, her initial dog..
EK: Yeah, no I do get that. Like she wants to keep his memory alive and cloning him is the closest she can get to that. It’s not all black and white obviously. I feel like that is something that everyone can relate to, it’s something that connects us all, that we go to extreme measures for love. That’s essentially what Moussaiieff was motivated by.
JH: Yeah, exactly, and I think it's fascinating how deeply philosophical this is. It’s not science fiction anymore, this is happening right now.
EK: Speaking of which, did you ever meet her in person or was the phone call as far as things went?
JH: No, I did! I did actually! I’m happy to say we got to meet with Dorrit. I was in London with Mundi, our CEO and executive producer of this podcast, and he knows her from Iceland. So we went to visit Dorrit at her lovely West London house, and ask her about Samson and Samur.
(Recording of meeting with Dorrit)
Dorrit Moussaieff: Tell me guys, you’re interviewing me about Samson?
Mundi Vondi: So I don’t know if you remember the phone call you had three…
JH: Yeah it’s already three years ago, with myself.
MV: Can you tell us the story of what happened?
DM: Yes. Agnes, Samur’s vet in Iceland, took a vile of blood and a little bit of skin from Samur. And a guy from FedEx came, we gave it to him, and he took it to Texas to the lab.
MV: Oh it’s in Texas?
DM: It was put on ice. Not dissimilar to the ice you have in the vodka [laughs]. And that’s where the process began. It was then inserted into a bitch that lived in Rochester. Because the terrain should be as similar as possible to Iceland. We had two failed attempts, and the third one.
MV: It worked out?
DM: Have you seen the photographs of me first getting him?
MV: Umm I’m not sure.
JH: I don’t think so, no.
DM: You need to see them. That will tell you a lot more than words can. It’s on my instagram. If I could clone my father I would do it immediately.
MV: Do you have some samples of your father?
DM: We all have samples everywhere. All you need to do, to take, is some hair, nails. Any genetic material will do it. It’s helpful if you’ve got blood, but you’ve got dried blood somewhere.
MV: You have some from your father? Dried blood?
DM: I kept some as soon as he died. It’s going to be another way of giving birth. A much more, and again I’m sure I’m going to be criticized, but a much less barbaric way of giving birth.
MV: You mean just the whole procedure happens in an artificial womb?
DM: I’m not even sure if they’re going to need an artificial womb, but this is not an area that I know about.
MV: I mean the less barbaric part comes from the no sex part?
No, no the sex part is the good part! Come on darling, the painful part. And having to be, especially for some women, very uncomfortable.
MV: Are you considering to clone Samson?
DM: I wouldn’t need to. The same genetic material is alreaedy there.
MV: Okay so, but do you intend to keep him alive for the rest of your life?
DM: I very much hope so.
MV: I mean as in if he would die you would clone him again?
DM: If I would die?
MV: No the dog.
DM: Well all us children might want a clone. He’s a part of the family, he’s the love of my life there’s no question.
MV: And do you see that it’s the same?
DM: It’s frightening.
MV: Oh really?
DM: Absolutely frightening
MV: How identical they are?
DM: Yes in every way. Samur didn’t like clapping, he always barked. Samson does the exact same thing. Obviously, Samur was basically a rescue dog. He grew up on a farm. He didn’t have the attention, the nutrients, the healthcare that Samson has. So in a strange way, he also didn’t have the upbringing. Samson is seriously trained. He’s polite, he asks you first, but they’re identical.
MV: Even in personality?
JH: So he carries on.
DM: Yes. Very strange, one difference, Samur never liked children. This is because on the farm he was brought up children annoyed him. I’ve particularly tried to have Samson around a lot of kids and he loves children, he’s very gentle with them. Samur always snapped at them.
JH: And so, just to pause here, we go on a mission to find some more tonic for our drinks before we finally get to see Dorrit’s video of her first encounter with her beloved Samson.
DM: It’s a moment that I will never ever forget.
JH: Oh wow.
DM: In that first minute, I don’t know if you noticed, he looks back at the woman who has taken care of him since he was basically born. And looks at her and says please don’t leave me with this women, which was me. He wants to go back. Two seconds later he starts kissing me, licking me. It’s amazing. The epigenetics clearly plays a big part.
MV: Okay. You mean like the genetic memory?
DM: Oh absolutely.
JH: Yeah he starts licking. Yeah because he kind of starts to shiver at first and then starts to kiss you.
MV: It’s so cute.
EK: Wow, she seams like such a fascinating person.
JH: Yeah she really is, I have to say she’s a real character and a real believer what’s more. She feels that this is a force of good for humanity, and is generally into the whole domain of bio-tech and the potential that it offers us, she really believes it.
EK: So, where are you at, with your thinking about cloning?
JH: If I’m honest, I’m still kind of on the fence. In the sense that a lot of the things that we look at on The Life Cycle podcast I feel like it’s almost inevitable that we as humans will go and do it. There’s always someone who will rush ahead and do it. And that really hopefully what this podcast can contribute to is the bigger conversation that needs to happen. Maybe we should come back to cloning and CRISPR. Not even cloning, just CRIPSR and some of the more small scale genetic interference that we as humans can do now. We need to have this conversatoin.
EK: What really struck me, what Dorrit said about this becoming a new way to give birth. Birth can be really traumatic and I don't want to deny that but at the same time, I think for me, giving birth was the most incredible, transformative experience I have ever had. It is indescribable. And also just, a privilege. And I would hope that people who wish to have biological children, would be able to go through that experience as well. Not to say that having children in a different way is not just as meaningful and powerful, but simply, as a physical experience that my mind and body have gone through, there is nothing I can compare it to.
JH: Thanks for listening and thanks for our guests Peter Stevenson and Dorrit Moussaieff.
EK: This episode was written and produced by me, Eva Kelly, with additional writing by John Holten.
JH: Sound editing and design was by the magnificent and wonderful David Magnusson
EK: Mundi Vondi is our executive producer and he also created the artwork for this episode in collaboration with Midjourney.
JH: Additional research, script supervision and factchecking was by Savita Joshi.
EK: Follow us on social media and subscribe for more wherever it is you listen to your podcasts.
JH: And reach out to us, we’d love to hear from you. Bye!
EK: Bye bye!