Why do researchers want to clone animals?
Agriculture researchers are interested in cloning livestock such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and poultry primarily for the purposes of breeding to create copies of ‘valuable’ animals. Currently, farmers use the animals that have the best genetics for some desired quality such as fast growth, leaner meat, or high milk production as breeding animals to produce offspring that will have similar qualities. By cloning these top breeders, farmers want to extend their reproductive potential and create whole herds or flocks with these uniform characteristics. Cloning is also used to produce copies of transgenic animals-animals who have been engineered with genes from another species in order to have better traits for production (such as faster growth, disease resistance, altered milk or meat products with ‘health benefits’ for humans, etc); to produce pharmaceuticals in their milk, blood, urine, or semen (pharming); or to produce tissues and organs for transplantation into humans (xenotranspla
