What should we do with animals? Most of us eat them. Quite of a lot of us enjoy them as pets and companions, or watching some of them in the wild. But what else? We used to use them to carry and haul for us, until technology made it redundant. But technology is now coming up with other ways of using the creatures we share the planet with. Recent developments in genetic engineering suggest we could use them as live "factories" for producing pharmaceuticals in milk or blood, or growing organs for human transplants. And whatever use we find for animals, should we clone them so we can do so more efficiently?
The Roslin Institute's recent breakthrough in producing several genetically identical sheep from a single cell line grabbed the headlines. It's by no means certain this would really lead to flocks of cloned lambs in the fields and hills of Scotland, or clinically reproducible cuts of meat on the supermarket shelves. But it does prompt us to ask questions about the way we are using animals with new technology, and the kinds of assumptions we make. For the past two years the Church of Scotland's Society, Religion and Technology Project has been examining these issues through an interdisciplinary working group of experts in both science and ethics.
One assumption is that the animal kingdom is there for us to use in almost any way scientists dream up or commercial companies see a market, short of inflicting gratuitous pain. The fact that we kill animals to eat them is taken to justify more or less any other use, especially if we can cite human medicine or job creation as goals. On this view, only if they are warm and furry, or primates, do we start to have some qualms, and even then, very selectively.
Others argue for going ahead if it's not ethically different from what we are already doing. But this can easily become an excuse not to look properly at the special features of the case in point. It also begs the question of whether what we are already doing is indeed ethically acceptable, or just something we turn a blind eye to. Often it takes a new technology, such as genetic engineering, to throw light backwards on highly unethical practices in things we do at present, such as the extremes reached by some areas of selective poultry breeding.
Human beings can use animals, but where do we say "no"? On a Christian understanding all of nature owes its existence ultimately to God, and men and women have a dual responsibility of both ruling and looking after it. Making something of nature through technology has to be balanced with other things. We have to recognise our limitations: we have finite and imperfect knowledge. And nature is not ours to do exactly what we like with. We too are creatures, companions with all created things. Our use of animals, therefore, implies we need a sense of "Family hold back".
Cloning seems to be a case in point. Why would we want to clone meat producing animals, anyway? If the root is the supermarket production system, and the incentive of lucrative meat contracts with the major chains, have we missed something vital? To manipulate animals to be born, grow and reach maturity for sale and slaughter at exactly the time we want them, to suit production schedules suggests a turning the animal into a mere commodity. Is this going too far in putting the mechanical paradigm of mass production efficiency over allowing an animal the freedom to be itself. To say it's "only" an animal, and there are jobs, or economic growth, or dividends at stake seems to miss the point. These are living things which demand respect, not just "widgets". Is cloning the point at which we should "hold back"? There is a deeper question still. The Bible declares that God created diversity, and rejoices in it. To clone is to reduce a living organism to a narrow blueprint, where God through evolution seems to have made a point of doing the opposite.
The continuing lack of a statutory Ethical Commission on Biotechnology is leaving such issues dealt with on a piecemeal basis, when many are asking for a better way of balanced debate.