I am not sure I understand why this is noteworthy. Some cattle has been cloned from dead animals and their offspring have entered the food chain. From the BBC report, “Cattle Cloned From Dead Animals:
The aim of livestock cloning is to clone the best animals to produce the best beef. But some cattle farmers believe it is impossible to pick the best quality animals until their meat has been properly analysed. That is why there are cloned bulls here that have been produced from the cells taken from the carcasses of dead animals. Brady Hicks of the JR Simplot company in Idaho said his organisation was among many that had tried out the technique successfully. “The animals are hanging on a rail ready to go to the meat counter,” he told BBC News. “We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it’s too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal.” These “resurrected” animals are then bred with naturally born cows. The next step is to see if their offspring - whose meat can be sold to consumers in the US - have the same qualities as the grandparent from which the cells were originally taken.
I am not sure why it is a story that some of the cloned animals originated from DNA of deceased animals. The very first born cloned mammal—Dolly—was cloned from a dead ewe whose mammary tissue has been frozen (hence, being named after the buxom Dolly Parton). But the fear that some cloned meat reached the UK made headlines there as some in the every panicky EU want to ban the sale of such meat in Europe altogether:
Cloning is not used by livestock farmers in Europe, and there are moves by some members of the European Parliament to ban it altogether. Mr Walton believes that would be a mistake. “If I were a European farmer and my competitors in the US, China and South America were using the technology, I’d be concerned about losing all access to it,” he said.
That’s always the argument used to justify overcoming every ethical and safety concern involving new technologies, isn’t it?
That said, I think cloning is merely another acceptable animal breeding technique—which is why we shouldn’t do it with humans. Now, one can reasonably not want to eat the flesh of animals that are the descendants of clones because it is not natural or for fear, unsubstantiated so far, that it could be somehow less safe than natural meat descended back to the dawn of mammals. (Eating such meant wouldn’t bother me, although I think there is a good argument for labeling.) But if we are disquieted about eating meat descended from clones, it shouldn’t be, it seems to me, because the original animal was dead when the cloning was conducted: It should be because the cloning was conducted.
