Cross Breeds

Is clonning extinct and soon to be extinct animals immoral?

I can't possibly imagine in the past million years how many hundreds of thousands of animals and mammals have gone exctinct and have never been written into history for man to see. The reason behind their extinction could be anything but I believe the ignorance and cruelty of man is responsible. But as we also evolve in science we learn to save & discover new things rather than simply destroying it.So, Is it important to preserve their existance amongst us for the sake of knowledge?

Public Comments

1. i think that since things become extinct for a reason it would be wrong to recreate a living being when it is not obviously the right environment for it. I will use polar bears as my example because they are receiving a lot of attention. global warming, is it mans' fault?? I don't know, but it is causing polars to drown right? well if we clone to replenish population they will continue drowning, unless we are keeping them in a false environment like the zoo for people to beat on the glass and yell at them-- what kind of a life is that for anything, let alone poking and prodding in a lab. Imagine if the temperature of the earth or say the make up of our air was unbreathable to humans, if we were cloned to keep from being extinct(hypothetically speaking) we still wouldn't be able to breathe with out the cause being corrected first; so it would be torturing the product. I think it is wrong, God has a plan and who are we to change it? If we are going to save anything, lets start with what we have left and lets do what we can to save the earth, or at least treat it respectfully as we may not even be the cause of global warming, but we don't have to try to hurry it along.
2. It's difficult to see how humans were responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs, much less the other great extinctions. The disappearance of the megfauna in North America some 10,000 years ago has often been ascribed to the arrival of man in that hemisphere. However it's now clear people were in the Americas for at least 6,000 years before the extinctions.The period also coincides with massive climatic change so a natural die off cannot be eliminated. A reasonable question is would the cloned animals be simply curiosities or free ranging herds? Where would we put mammoth, mastodons, saber tooth cats, giant ground sloths and the similar megafauna of the prehistoric Americas? The California Condor is a good case study. It's numbers in the wild dwindled even as efforts to preserve them intensified. Finally, all the wild birds were captured and placed in captivity.What was the prime cause of the decline in numbers? Most deaths were caused by the naturalists capturing the birds for study. Efforts to "save" the bird increased it's decline.The bird is at the top of the food chain with carrion as it's most common prey. This means that for the species to survive, power lines, cars and similar hazards must be reduced and a constant supply of dead animals needs to be provided. That's just to support one species. There's also the passenger pigeon. The bird flew in "flocks of them a mile (1.6 km) wide and 300 miles (500 km) long," with an estimated population of 5 billion in the United States. The bird required flocks of large numbers to support breeding. A clone would be possible but to produce a self-sustaining population would require a huge expense of time money and land. The threat of the bird to farm crops was and would be enormous. Were a mammoth cloned, it would no doubt be seen as a triumph of science and make money as a zoo specimen. The moral question would then become if man had the additional responsibility to establish mammoths as a free ranging and self supporting population? With the cloning of say the mammoth would not there be a moral issue that people were only reviving "interesting" species and ignoring the many others? Finally there's the moral issue that the resources spent cloning extinct animals would be better spent ending human suffering and improving the lives of humans
3. I don't have a problem with animals going extinct, it's a part of nature. Do I wish there were Saber-tooth tigers, rodents the size of hippos, and tyradactoes flying around? I sure do, but nature is nature. I feel that gene experiments with animals will be very beneficial to us, as they will serve as a testing ground to understanding our own genes and how they can be manipulated.
4. we must if we can
5. Immoral? Not at all. But which version of morality are we talking about here? Like any other creature on earth, we are incapable of doing anything which is not natural. "Artificial" products are not the opposite of natural products, but rather a subset of natural products. "Culture" is part of our nature (like many other animals), and does not defy natural laws. If we elect to clone near-extinct or extinct species, that will be a natural act and will result in creatures that will either help their species survive or not - a purely natural and quite amoral process.