We've always been interested in cloning wildlife, and deer are a huge deal here. Every year, someone has harvested a big deer and sent us its testicles.
- Texas A&M Researcher Mark Westhusin
I suppose this is the essence of conservation, no? Cloning a deer so you can kill it, over and over and over again. Who says hunters aren't true sportsmen AND conservationists??
A lucky deer hunter in south Texas not only got to kill and mount the trophy of a lifetime, but - using a strip of its skin, some ice and a postage stamp - he also got a team of scientists to clone it.
Veterinarians at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, announced last week they had successfully cloned the first white-tailed deer.
Dewey, who is nearly 7 months old, appears to be healthy and is developing normally....
Westhusin's team sees this research as playing a role in deer conservation.
"Hunters and breeders would like to conserve the genetics of their trophies," Westhusin said. "I mean, when you think about it, once you shoot a trophy, it's dead. And there's no way it's going to get back up and start breeding."
Certainly, if you can throw a fish back into the water after catching it, why shouldn't you be able to do the moral equivalent when it comes to deer? After all, life is all about cycles, right? Kill it, clone it; kill it, clone it...ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Of course, if we can leave behind the moral ambiguity in cloning animals for sport killing, we are then confronted with the slippery slope of cloning's overall moral ambiguities. Medical ethics and our legal system have in no way kept up with the realities and the arguments for and against cloning. Just as the the progress and development of the Internet has outstripped the law's ability to regulate and control it, the issue of cloning is behaving in a similar fashion. Every step forward, every bit of progress, every new development exposes the reality that as a society we are ill-equipped to deal with the moral and ethical questions posed by the concept of cloning.
I'm not going to pretend to have any of the answers, because I'm not certain that I understand the issue well enough to pontificate. What does concern me, however, is the potential for abuse and misuse inherent in this technology. This is no longer a concept of pure science fiction- this is a reality. Today, white-tail deer; tomorrow....????
