Bijdrage tijdens de openbare hoor­zitting over het klonen van dieren voor land­bouw­doel­einden

Anja Hazekamp (PvdD): Thank you. I am shocked that we have to discuss the cloning of animals here again. Consumers don't want it, farmers don't need it, and the suffering of all animals involved is severe and extreme. Cloning is not only expensive, we also need a lot of animals to perform this technique: we need carrying mothers, we need donor mothers and we need a lot of clones - that's the idea.

I have a question to doctor Broom about the history of cloning. We see that it's been done since a few decades already, and in the presentation I couldn't see if there was any improvement in the technique regarding animal welfare or the efficiency of animals used. Nevertheless, I hear some members plead for a temporary moratorium instead of a full ban on cloning. I would like to know: do you think there will be any improvement in the cloning technique for animal welfare in the near future?

Professor Donald Broom: [...] I got a direct question form Ms. Hazekamp. Have there been improvements in the methodology in relation to the welfare of the mothers, the difficulties of pregnancy, difficulties of giving birth and the deformities in the young animals? The answer is that although we've had cloning for a long time, in mammals the methods which have now been used for fourteen years - or sixteen years it is, in fact - we still have about the same problems that we had when the methods were first being used. So it isn't the case that we've had much in the way of improvements. So we can't solve that problem in the short term.