What is the main reason of using cloning instead of using selective breeding?
Selective breeding implies that you are selecting characteristics and breeding the animals to produce favourable combinations of those characteristics – trying to improve the performance of the species – for example type of wool, wool production rate, amount of meat produced – it depends on the animal and what you are after.Of course, some of the resultant offspring will be poor combinations as well, without the desired set of characteristics! If an animal has all the characteristics that are wanted and you just want many copies of that particular gene set in that animal, it can be cloned and identical copies of that animal can be produced. there’s no variation – that what cloning is – identical copies.
