UK - Unlike the USA where biotechnology companies are free to experiment on the population at large. The United Kingdom is rather more circumspect about such matters.

For years the USA, EU, biotechnology companies and ministry of agriculture have been trying to get us to accept genetically modified crops. The population at large is hostile to them being grown let alone introduced to the food chain.

News has come out that both milk and meat that has come from cloned cows has entered the food chain. This is equally distasteful to the food buying public. So let us examine what has happened here and the risks if any to the beef eating and milk drinking population.

The International Herald Tribune reported last week that  An employee at Humphreston Farm, near Birmingham — the farm at the center of that storm — said the owners, Michael and Oliver Eaton, had since sold their herd and were growing crops instead.

And that another British dairy farmer said he was using milk from a cow bred from a clone as part of his daily production. He also said he was selling embryos from the same cow to breeders in Canada.

The farmer insisted on anonymity, saying that the British public regarded cloning as so distasteful that buyers would stop taking his milk.

So what are the risks?

Assuming that there has been no deliberate genetic modification to the cloned embryo, almost all the risks are to the cloned animal. Remember Dolly the sheep? who was put down at half of a sheep's normal life expectancy.

The trick seems to be to get the clone to breed as much as possible. Hopefully the desired genetic information will be passed on to the offspring and the problems of cloning be left behind. Short life expectancy etc due to the DNA headers and footers being shortened in cloned embryo's.

So as long as there is NO genetic modification of the cloned animals DNA then:

For milk it seems that as long as only the offspring of the cloned cow are used to produce milk the should not be a problem.

The same should be true for Beef cattle as long as only the offspring of the cloned cow is slaughtered for food.

The meat and milk of the cloned animals should be treated as a biohazard and destroyed with caustic soda to prevent it entering the food chain.

But this begs the question why go to all the trouble to clone an animal in the first place, when you can breed from it?

Here @ The Bastard the only reason we can see that justify s the cloning of an animal is if the embryo was to have been genetically modified. This is opening a huge can of worms. If the public will not wear genetically modified crops, the genetically modified animals in the food chain would spark riots.

In fact the only advantage we could think of would be to spread a desirable gene through out the worlds heard of cows in a very great hurry. This almost by definition means that some sort of genetic modification has been done to the DNA.

This also brings up the subject of genetic Biodiversity. with all the problems that incurred from line breeding. Line breeding  or the crossing of father and daughter or mother and son promotes the likelihood that recessive genes are expressed in later generations.

We have already bread cows that if left in a fields of lush pasture, would starve to death! Because they could not eat enough to survive. These cows are designed to be fed on food pellets. This is not sensible or sustainable

All in all we feel that Cloning is a Trojan house designed to allow the speedy introduction of genetically modified characteristics to the worlds herds of cows.