WASHINGTON – Citing serious animal welfare concerns, The HSUS today asked the Food and Drug Administration to block sales of products from cloned farm animals, their byproducts, and offspring.

In a letter sent today to the director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, The HSUS noted that a recent National Academy of Sciences review found adverse impacts on animal welfare in the cloning of farm animals. Those adverse impacts include:

• Intrusive and potentially painful reproductive manipulations. Surgery is used, for instance, to remove eggs from female breeding stock and to implant embryos to produce transgenic and cloned animals. The animals used as breeding stock can be repeatedly subjected to these procedures.

• Extraordinarily high rates of fetal deaths. Health problems in those who survive to birth include respiratory distress, pneumonia, lethargy, cardiomyopathy and metabolic problems.

• Abnormalities such as brain lesions, skeletal malformations, and incomplete development of the vascular tract. Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, suffers from severe arthritis.

• Higher than average birth weights in cloned cattle and sheep, necessitating caesarean deliveries which may be repeated on the same breeding stock.

Dr. Michael Appleby, HSUS vice president for farm animals and sustainable agriculture, says that the artificial selection for particular qualities that is current practice in modern agriculture has already led to production related disorders such as crippling and high disease vulnerability, a problem that will only worsen if cloning takes hold.

“A single pathogen could wipe out countless numbers of genetically identical animals, putting animal safety and the world’s food supply at risk,” said Appleby. “Already animals are suffering from maladies at a rate unheard of before we applied biotechnology to the barnyard. It would be disastrously premature to put this technology into commercial practice.”

In the letter to Stephen Sundlof, Director of the FDA Center for Veterinary Medicine, Appleby also raised concerns about the impact of cloning on the small family farmer. “This expensive technology will benefit only biotech companies and large agribusinesses,” Appleby wrote. “This will exacerbate the ongoing trend in agriculture today of the loss of small family farms which are often more humane and ecologically sustainable.”

To date, the FDA has asked producers to hold off on selling such products even though no current federal law or regulation prohibits such sales. While appealing for the FDA to deny entry to the marketplace for products from cloned animals, The HSUS praised the agency for the precautionary approach it has taken thus far.

“We commend the FDA for its actions in commissioning the National Academy of Sciences report and requesting that food from cloned animals not enter the marketplace,” Appleby concluded. “These measures show an appropriate, precautionary approach, and we trust the FDA will further this by putting more weight on the animal safety issues outlined in the report.”