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: Glorfindel of Gondolin

Cloned cow and dead wolf

Two interesting items from Goat, the blog of the wonderful magazine High Country News:

Thanks to a Food and Drug Administration decision made this morning, you might soon be able to order a McClonewich at the drive-through or spread a smear of low-fat clone cheese on your morning bagel.

Sound yummy? Maybe not so much, once you realize you won't even know whether what you're eating came from cloned animals or not. The FDA has also decided not to require any labeling of "meat and milk from clones of cattle, swine, and goats, and the offspring of clones from any species traditionally consumed as food. . . ."

This decision exemplifies the "industrial" mindset that agrarians like myself loathe so much.  It blesses a novel technology that may be safe when that term is considered narrowly, but that may profoundly change the world in ways that we still do not fully understand.  It then allows this technology to enter the market without any labeling, making it practically impossible for individual citizens to take personal responsibility for the use of that technology.  After all, how can we individually exercise caution with the use of cloned animals if we don't know whether the meat we're eating is cloned or not?  Answer: we can't.  And that's just what the industrial producers of animal products are counting on.  The FDA gave them what they wanted, at our expense.

The second interesting item is this post explaining that the Department of the Interior is set to remove gray wolves in in the northern Rockies from the endangered species list.  Soon, ranchers in Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana will get to shoot the wolves without fear of punishment (not that fear of the Bush Administration's Interior Department stopped them from killing 140 of the wolves last year).

I'd be proud to be a citizen of one of those three great states:  Idaho!  Wyoming!  Montana!  Where we value "livestock" over one of the most inspiring creatures sharing our planet, the lowly gray wolf, and where our hardy livestock herders can kill these varmints at will!

Makes me want to move to Iowa, it does.

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Full post as published by Glorfindel of Gondolin on January 16, 2008 (boomark / email).