Cattle, Sheep And Pigs

The laws and principles discovered and developed by Mendel have been applied to animal breeding. The most controversial example in recent years of the kind of perversion of Mendel's Laws we occasionally come across being Dolly the Sheep. Cloning is not a new practice. In plant breeding clones have been developed and used for decades in developing new strains of cereals and other plants. It does not go without question. There are ethical questions about the biotechnology that is applied to plants and animals and humans.

The ethical debates about livestock farming and developments in husbandry have been going on for years. Animal welfare is a great concern for good farmers and animal lovers. Housing concerns have been expressed about farm livestock not least in the case of veal crates. Keeping animals in cramped and uncomfortable conditions is cruel and it is bad husbandry. It can be very stressful for the animals involved. It lowers the quality of whatever life they have and lowers their market value. Only the best husbandry practices are recommended for keeping farm livestock.

Some of the ethical questions argued about in agriculture have eventually come up in wider society in other contexts. Some agricultural practices are passed on to practitioners in other branches of science and the principles applied to humans. The most well known are things like artificial insemination, embryonic transfer, surrogacy and cloning. There are many more. It is a serious debate about the future of farming and the future of society as a whole as what is practiced in one is occassionally practiced in the other. Agriculture sometimes seems like a laboratory for experiments in social engineering. Monkeys and mice, cattle, sheep and pigs.