Why is AAVS petitioning the FDA to regulate cloned animals?
It is likely that the FDA will allow milk and meat from cloned animals to be sold to the public without regulation. Before food from cloned animals is allowed on the market, however, the serious ethical concerns, including animal welfare concerns, raised by animal cloning must be addressed. These are important issues that Americans feel strongly about, and they must be thoroughly examined before any determination is made regarding cloned animals. As a result, in October 2006 AAVS joined with the Center for Food Safety and several other animal welfare, consumer, and environmental organizations to petition the FDA to establish an ethics Advisory Committee, similar to ones set up to discuss human genetic technologies, to provide an opportunity for public participation and transparency in the animal cloning debate. In addition, the petition calls on the FDA to instate a mandatory moratorium on the sale of cloned food until these issues have been resolved. If the FDA does approve food from
