Farm animal cloning and ethics: Revisiting the animal welfare debate

The notion of animal welfare and of how to define it has been widely discussed within the literature. However, an integrative model, regarded to mirror the scope of animal welfare science and the ethical aspects of human treatment of animals directly related to the animals, has won some popularity the last 10-15 years. Thus the subjective experience of the animal, the health or fitness of the animal and the behaviour are seen as the areas that cover the ethical questions related to animal welfare. This way of defining the ethically relevant concerns does, however, leave out central ethical notions relevant to the evaluation of various biotechnological tools used on animals.

In this article we will look closer at these ethical notions under the heading of animal integrity and discuss to what extent these notions are connected to the area of animal welfare. This will be done using farm animal cloning as an example. Although this technology can be seen as not necessarily compromising the animals from the perspective of an integrative welfare definition, this does not seem to end the ethical debate about cloning. The central claim will be that although the concept of animal integrity does not readily fit into an integrative definition of animal welfare, it is, however, a relevant issue in this context and should not be forgotten as a central aspect of the over-all evaluation of the impact of the technology on animals.